Gold & Youth - Dream Baby

BC: Top 10 of 2021

by Sean Orr

Gold and Youth’s long-awaited sophomore record squirms and shifts from new wave devotional dream pop to Leonard Cohen-tinged apocalyptic poetics with breathless ease. Whip-smart and woke, Dream Baby is an epic and sprawling soundtrack to contemporary collective anxieties at the end of history- a cavernous ode to the banality of late capitalism. The resulting tension manifests in hazy synth washes, cascading harmonies, and melancholic glam-tinged theatrics. For fans of Lower Dens, Dean Blunt and Billy Idol.

Bo Burnham’s transcendent comedy special isn’t the only great piece of COVID-adjacent art titled Inside released this year. The indie-rock quintet’s latest opens and closes with the sounds of the 7pm clanging pots and pans that once heralded the essential workers, and many of the tracks find them grappling with introspective thoughts while trapped in a room – being stuck inside one’s own head being an even worse fate than the physical boundaries.