Love Thy Neighbour: Gang of Youths - A Sudden Light

This week our friends over at Melbourne-based website Who The Hell introduce us to a new track they're digging: 'A Sudden Light' by Gang of Youths.

Gang of Youths aren’t confused, just curious. People who write about music love it when a band releases two tracks that sound completely disparate from each other. We thrive on that stuff. It lets us make stupid comparisons, gives us an excuse to abuse the right to use adjectives like ‘juxtaposing’ and ‘brooding’, and makes the lesser of the two feel reasonably insecure.

‘A Sudden Light’ and ‘Riverland’ sound like they’ve been penned by two different artists. For anyone who wanted an example of what Wim Butler at your birthday or Julian Casablancas singing at your funeral would sound like; Sydney band Gang of Youths are your smorgasboard. As soon as that major-minor piano refrain treads in at the start of ‘Riverland’, you get the feeling this is going to be something special. Actually, anyone who can sit down at a piano and sing in-tune is pretty special (and sadly, too rare these days). It’s definitely a mood setter; a track for closing time, quiet train rides home. I can picture this track sitting nicely in the background of some Sophia Coppola film, the one where the characters are probably dressed in ornate clothing and doing something suitably ironic.

On that note – for the small lapse of stillness that ‘Riverland’ brings, ‘A Sudden Light’ is the punchline here. It’s a loose, belter of an anthem with modulating chorus, overbearing references to children and drugs and enough swarming around harmonic ‘WHOAAAHS” to put the whole Brisbane league of bands out of business. This is a killer track – and even for GOY’s indecisiveness, you should probably claim this tune early. There's nothing wrong with committing to a good hook, right?