As our beauty starts to fade in our grand decay
The boujie boys high-fiving us all through one big last parade.
Are dreams the stuff of liberation, of beauty and freedom, and life and future? Or are they a dose of painkiller that enables normalcy; a perpetually-dangling carrot? This is the anxious central tension of Dream Baby, the second full-length record from Vancouver’s Gold & Youth. The dazzling single, “The Worse The Better”, out today, launches the philosophical 21st-century-malaise rabbit holes presented by the LP. With a mask of shimmering synth and glittery guitars, Lyall croons, “The worse the better is coming our way!” It is an acknowledgment that with the shadow can come bliss and self-delusion in the cracks of light, but lord, there is so much shadow.
“Is it a positive or a negative that we can kind of delude ourselves?” asks front person and primary songwriter Matthew Lyall. “It’s both.”
Gold & Youth maps these complexities over a sharp, saccharine web of sounds drawing upon Bowie art-rock, the sardonic wit of Leonard Cohen, throbbing new wave, and 90s alt-pop that darts between arena ambition and bedroom cynicism. We hear the wry social commentary elements of Jarvis Cocker, Divine Comedy, Spector, and Blur as well, not so much in sound, but in spirit: a sprawling and maximalist approach, blending the apocalyptic and the absurd. Gold & Youth dazedly ricochets past the horrors of extraction capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy, but all the while clinging for dear life to the comfort and power of interpersonal relations and the possibilities they suggest.
“The Worse the Better is a fun little bop about water – sliding into the abyss,” says Lyall. “A woozy anthem for the downwardly mobile about the crushing banality of evil rendered by the acid vat of late-stage capitalism as we work dead-end jobs at the end of history and pray for some technocratic saviour to build us a biodome on Mars. Loud and fast and then sputtering and wheezing, kind of like a dream machine going kaputt as it runs out of gas. Truly the feel-bad hit of the summer! Tell your friends.”
Watch the lyric video for The Worse The Better below:
Dream Baby is due out on November 5th via Paper Bag Records. Pre-save for the single The Worse The Better” here.
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