Gold & Youth Announce New Album “Dream Baby”, Share New Single “The Worse The Better”

By: Staff –

Vancouver’s Gold & Youth have announced the release of their new album, Dream Baby, on November 5th, 2021 via Paper Bag. In addition, the quartet has also shared a brand new lyric video for their new single “The Worse The Better”, which can be watched below.

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 carrot perpetually dangling on a miles-long stick? This is the anxious central tension of Dream Baby. As the band’s primary songwriter and front person Matthew Lyall explains, most of the time, dreams are both a blessing and a curse. Dream Baby hums to life via the bright, uptempo alt-pop melancholy of lead single, “The Worse The Better,” and Lyall crooning through early 21st century malaise on the verse. 

“’The Worse the Better’ is a fun little bop about water-sliding into the abyss,” expands Lyall on the song. “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 savior 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.”

Lyall wrote and recorded Dream Baby in his apartment over the past two years, before sharing with geographically-dispersed band mates Louise Burns (vocals, bass), Jeff Mitchelmore(drums), and Murray McKenzie (guitar) to finish. Matt Cardinal (nêhiyawak) contributed synth work, and producer and long-time collaborator Colin Stewart (Art d’Ecco, Dan Mangan) assembled and mixed the tracks at his Victoria studio. The isolated writing experience enabled Lyall to bring a new voice to his lyrics, one dripping with direct, biting humour and stream-of-consciousness irony rather than abstract storytelling.

“There’s a duality about dreaming, about the future, about what your plans can be, whatever your ideas of tomorrow are,” says Lyall. “You sort of need it: it’s a fundamental aspect of human nature, we have to have these visions of what a future can be in order to plod through the day and keep going. But it’s also this thing that is captured and manipulated as a promise that never has to be delivered upon.

Dream Baby maps these complexities over a sharp, saccharine web of sounds: Bowie-ish art-rock, Leonard Cohen’s sardonic piano wit, throbbing new wave, and alt-pop that darts between arena ambition and bedroom cynicism. Lyall’s vision here is sprawling and maximalist with a healthy hint of the apocalyptic and the absurd—an aesthetic and tonal match for our times. It’s a fitting melange for a record that ricochets, dazed, 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.

“This is both the inelegant wheezing of a dream machine going kaputt and a testament to life-affirming solidarity in the face of it all,” says Lyall. “Kinda tragic, kinda funny.”

Gold & Youth will play two B.C.-based shows on October 22 + 23, 2021. Full show details below.

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

2021 Tour Dates
October 22, 2021 @ Capitol Ballroom, Victoria, BC w/ Yukon Blonde
October 23, 2021 @ Hollywood Theatre, Vancouver, BC w/ Yukon Blonde