PREMIERE: Gold & Youth Channel The Power Of Love On New Single “Blush” From New Album ‘Dream Baby’; Talk About The Process In Latest Q&A

Vancouver indie outfit Gold & Youth return tomorrow, November 5th, with their sophomore album Dream Baby, the first full-length project since their 2013 debut Beyond Wilderness. Written over the last two years from frontman Matthew Lyall’s apartment, Dream Baby showcases the band’s evolution, stepping into a more versatile and far-reaching style of shoegaze and dream-pop, mixed together with crushing alt-rock sensibilities and cold hard realism. Ahead of the album’s release, the band have shared their final single “Blush”, a multi-decade spanning track that pulls from ’70s icons Davie Bowie, and Stevie Nicks, with hints of ’90s and ’00s -era shoegaze that builds into surreal drones of guitars and vocals.

“’Blush’ is about the power of love baby!” remarks lead singer and songwriter Matthew Lyall. “Actually though, it’s about finding some semblance of purpose and meaning and ability to make things better through our love for each other. We’re surrounded by these cascading crises caused by the systems we’ve allowed to take the reigns of our world. And perhaps the most sinister part is the sheer banality of it all, the slickness and efficiency with which we can be dehumanized and alienated from each other. Blush is about saying ‘sure, the world we’ve created is full of bullshit, but that’s not some inevitably, it doesn’t actually have to be this way, and we have an antidote, and it’s each other.’”

The harsh reality is smoothed out courtesy of Lyall and bassist Louise Burns’ duet. The resilience of the song’s message builds into a triumphant and colossal finish, showcasing Gold & Youth’s abilities to re-shape the genre into something both transfixing and sing-along worthy. “We basically wanted to make a song that sounded like Stevie Nicks singing on top of a shoegazey version of Heroes (although there’s a good argument that Robert Fripp’s guitar on Heroes is the true proto shoegaze part). A very special shout out on this song to my friend Matthew Cardinal (Nêhiyawak), who is a wildly creative and talented songwriter and musician. He added a bunch of incredible synth, guitar and ambient noise parts all over the record, and his work on ‘Blush’ is my favourite.”

Watch the visualizer for “Blush” below, and dive into the latest Q&A feature just past.

1. The Worse The Better
2. Empire State Of Mind
3. Blush
4. Ruins
5. Dying In LA
6. Maudlin Days (Robocop)
7. 90s Night
8. Bohemian Grove *Digital Only
9. A Strange Night At The Madonna Inn
10. Dancing With Chains

GOLD & YOUTH – UPCOMING CANADIAN SHOWS

December 8, 2021 @ Capitol Ballroom, Victoria, BC w/ Yukon Blonde

December 10, 2021 @ Hollywood Theatre, Vancouver, BC w/ Yukon Blonde

There are a lot of topics brought up on Dream Baby – where does “Blush” fit into the tracklist thematically and sonically? 

Blush was one of the first tracks I wrote for the record and it definitely helped sharpen and clarify what songs made it and what didn’t for the rest of the record. It’s also one of the most collaborative tracks on the record, because it didn’t really come to life until Louise came into the studio and started messing around with the vocal parts. We all loved the basic melodies and feel, but something wasn’t quite working between our vocal parts so Louise and I switched harmonies and then shifted it up five or six steps from the demo, which was our producer Colin’s idea. I had already recorded most of the guitars by that point, so we ended up pitch shifting everything thinking we would re-record it, but we ended up loving the the way the guitars sounded, which were all warped and detuned, and it just gave this new uneasy subtext to the song which was really fitting. Then our pal Matt Cardinal (Nêhiyawak) took that cue and ran with it, adding these beautifully eerie analog synth flourishes and textures. Once we got the mix balanced, it really helped us understand how to do the rest of the record because it’s all pretty dense and maximalist, even shoegazey at times, so we needed a template to move forward and Blush was it. 

How does it feel to go from an isolated writing process to full band live shows?

Well we haven’t played any shows yet, our first few got pushed because of Covid so we’re actually just starting rehearsals now. We’ll have a bigger live band than we’ve had in the past, with some rotating characters joining in to help including Matt Cardinal whenever he can, and our pals Darcy Hancock on guitar (from Ladyhawk) and Andrew Rasmussen on keys (Hannah Georgas). We’re gonna suck for a while as we remember how to play shows again and then we’ll hopefully suck less by the time anyone reading this sees us.

Now eight years since your debut album, how does it feel looking back? And how does Beyond Wilderness compare to Dream Baby? 

Well I wrote a ton of music in that time, most of it never saw the light of day and some of it ended up in other projects. But I had always hoped to do something as Gold & Youth again, mainly since I really love everyone in the band, they are like family. Jeff (drummer) and I have been playing music together since high school, so it would be weird to just stop doing that. As far as comparing the two records, they are really different. This one is much, much better, you should definitely buy this one. Sell your crypto and buy multiple copies in fact. Pretend it’s an NFT or whatever. 

“Blush”’s message of finding strength in loving one another is a powerful one – If you had no limitations, what would be something you would do to remind the world that we need to love each other? 

No limitations? Grant public ownership and worker control over every company, bank and institution in the world. It’s socialism or barbarism, we’ll only get to pick one. I’m a big fan of the author David Graeber, and he had this quote that can seem simplistic at first glance, but mainly because of how deluded we’ve become that our current systems are some inevitable result of human nature and not fictional social constructs that we could replace. Anyway, here’s the quote: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently”. 

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