Youth Lagoon details forthcoming album, Rarely Do I Dream

In the fall of 2023, Powers discovered a shoebox filled with home videos in his parents’ basement. “When I took the tapes home and popped in the first one, it was my brother Bobby and I at the state fair. I was 4 years old choking on a corn dog,” he laughs. “If anything’s a summary of life, that is.” Powers spent the following week recording his favorite moments off the TV — Easter egg hunts, backyard baseball, bloody noses, birthday parties, road trips, and all the life in-between.

The vivid intimacies of life and boyhood depicted in Powers’ home movies began shaping and infusing with his songs. He started sampling the audio and manipulating it into a kind of musical cinematography, fusing past with future. “What I was really consumed with was how much I could zoom in on my actual history,” says Powers. “I wanted to really make someone feel like they were inside my living room in 1993, but rearrange the furniture a bit. Something about combining that level of hyperreality with fairytales of devils and detectives weirdly felt like the truest way to immortalise these pieces of my family.”

“This song came from a thought I had of giving the angel of death a hug,” Powers says of the new single. “We spend our whole lives running from this thing we can’t outrun. This body is temporary, but there is no death. Only transformation. A door opens when you learn to let go of the identity you’ve been building your whole life. Someone told me a couple years ago, ‘I have good news for you and I have bad news. The bad news is Trevor is doomed. There’s no hope for Trevor. The good news is — you’re not Trevor.’ When I heard that, it clicked.”

Rarely Do I Dream follows 2023's, Heaven Is a Junkyard – his first full-length release in eight years.

Tracklist:

1. Neighborhood Scene
2. Speed Freak
3. Football
4. Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)
5. Seersucker
6. Lucy Takes A Picture
7. Perfect World
8. My Beautiful Girl
9. Canary
10. Parking Lot
11. Saturday Cowboy Matinee
12. Home Movies (1989-1993)