Gang Of Youths | 'angel in realtime.'

This week we are crushing REAL HARD on Gang Of Youths new album... angel in realtime.  After teasing us for almost a year with their singles ‘the angel of 8th ave.’, ‘unison’, ‘the man himself’, ‘tend the garden’ and ‘in the wake of your leave’ we finally have the full album, which has been described as the bands most personal to date.

Inspired by the loss of frontman Dave Le’aupepe’s father, it’s a record which channels its emotional intensity and existential questions into an exploratory sonic tapestry that touches upon everything from Britpop and post-punk to American minimalism and contemporary classical. It also pays tribute to Le’aupepe’s family heritage, with samples and original instrumentation from the Polynesian islands and the wider South Pacific.

The album features all the big moments that have soundtracked Gang of Youths’ rise, including  ‘the angel of 8th ave.’, ‘unison’, ‘the man himself’, ‘tend the garden’ and ‘in the wake of your leave.’ The album’s previously unreleased tracks provide plenty more, with an experimental hybrid of contemporary American minimalism, and electronica on ‘you in everything’, the 2-step and big beat rhythms of ‘the kingdom is within you’, and the cathartic conclusion provided by the sweeping, multi-textured ‘goal of the century’.

Dave Le’aupepe has channelled every drop of emotion into Gang of Youths’ most personal album to date. For the band, which features multi-instrumentalists Jung Kim, Tom Hobden, Max Dunn and Donnie Borzestowski, the decision to rent an old warehouse space in Hackney, London and self-produce the record was absolutely vital.

The record also pays tribute to Le’aupepe’s family heritage, firstly with the band’s pre-pandemic trip to Aotearoa to record with Pasifika and Māori instrumentalists the Anuanua Drummers from the Cook Islands, Shane McClean and the Auckland Gospel Choir. These recordings, together with the extensive sampling of composer and explorer David Fanshawe’s late 1970s field recordings of indigenous Pasifika music give the record a distinctive sense of time and place. When you add to this the 42-piece string section Hobden and Le’aupepe travelled to Budapest to record, the album effectively spans 50 years of collective recording and as many as 7 countries.