Music > Interviews

Gold & Youth

29/09/21

Alice spoke to Gold & Youth frontman, Matthew Lyall, ahead of the long-awaited release of their second album, ‘Dream Baby’ on November 5. He talks to us about everything that went into it, from 90’s car commercials and the banality of capitalism to Christmas presents from his Grandma.

We’re excited for the release of ‘Dream Baby’ later this year! It’s been a while since the release of your last album; how did you decide on a right time to release your second?

I’m a pretty slow songwriter to begin with and then I essentially stopped making music for a few years, which didn’t help. I had thrown out four or five albums worth of material in the years following the last record and wasn’t really in a great place. In 2019 I started writing songs to and for my fiancée, based on the conversations we were having about how to respond to the world around us. The timing of the release was just circumstantial; we finished the recording earlier in May 2021 and our label was happy to get moving on it right away.

How has the pandemic affected you all in terms of getting out an album? Have you found that you’ve had more time to write and reflect?

If we had been touring, the pandemic would have been a nightmare for us as a band, as I know it has been for so many dear pals whose livelihood is dependent on it. But it did allow for time and space. We ended up moving back home to a small island town off the west coast of Canada, and have spent a lot of the last 18 months in the studio, and when not there, in a garden surrounded by chickens and living a very, very low key life. We were incredibly lucky to have that as an option, and I took full advantage of the time and space to fully dive back into song-writing for the first time in years.

Who are some of your major influences? Your new album seems very eclectic, do you all have different tastes or try to mesh all of them together to follow a certain sound?

Too many to name, but the ones that probably shine through most on the record would be artists like Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Brian Eno, Cocteau Twins, New Order. I think the spirit of the record also borrows heavily from songwriters who can thread the needle of social commentary between tragedy and comedy, like Scott Walker, PJ Harvey, Pulp etc. Also, a lot of the sounds and tones of the record are really deliberate choices to help construct a universe around a song. In Empire State of Mind for example, I recorded these ridiculously over-the-top guitar flourishes that are meant to mimic the kind of jingoistic music you’d hear in an 1990s Ford F150 commercial.

What does your lyric-writing process look like? A lot of tracks, like ‘90’s Night’, feature storytelling, are these pulled from your own life experiences?

That song specifically was a bit of a joke that got out of hand. For lyrics, I used to use the cut-up technique a lot, where you take full bodies of text (your own or someone else’s) and then literally chop it up and rearrange it until you construct new meanings out of words and phrases being thrown against each other. Bowie borrowed this technique from William S Burroughs, who in turn, stole it from the Dadaists. ‘90s Night’ was the last song I wrote lyrics for and by that point I had this huge list of unused lyrics from the rest of the record that I loved as isolated lines, but hadn’t necessarily found a home yet, so I began to just throw them together in a random order and then see if a through line would develop.

I had known that I wanted the song to be based on how our culture is constantly mining and repackaging the near past and how the feedback loop has started to get so recursive so quickly that cultural eras are basically non-existent now. Like, the dominant mono-cultures of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s are so easily identifiable by their tropes, but in the last twenty years, it’s all just sort of fused together into this hyper-accelerated sensory overload, everything, all the time, all at once in little bite sized dopamine hit packages. Like in 2009, we literally had these ironic 90’s themed nights at clubs. Can you imagine that equivalent a decade later? A 2000’s themed night in 2019, what would that even look like? So, lyrically I just thought it would be funny to have this collection of non-sequiturs about this from a guy who is clearly losing his mind, imagining the last time his dreams felt alive was at a 90’s night in 2009. I don’t know. This all makes more sense in my head.

How did you all originally get into making music?

I grew up in a musical family. My mom was a music teacher and I started piano around five or so and like most piano kids who fell in love with their parent’s record collections, I eventually found my way to the guitar. I spent most of my childhood in the Middle East. We were basically cut off from contemporary pop culture for the 90’s since it was kinda pre internet. So, most of the music that filtered through to us was pirated tapes and CDs that existed in this vacuum, completely unaffected by whatever cultural waves were happening in the west. I had the luxury of having this really bizarre collection of music without needing to put it into cultural context or reckon with whether it was cool or embarrassing. I was able to earnestly love Aqua, Rage Against the Machine and Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals in the same moment without needing to reconcile any potential cultural contradictions in doing so.

As far as making my own music went, I had this little Boss 4 track recorder and I started off recording myself trying to play along to Metallica songs when I was probably 12 or so. My friend Mo had a Ride the Lightning t-shirt which was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and without having ever heard it, I asked my Grandma to send it to me for Christmas and God bless her she did. I would have loved to have been working at the HMV when this 80 year old lady came in to buy it. Anyway, after a little while, I started recording my own ideas mainly because I was too bad at the guitar to actually play along to Metallica. I started layering guitar over and over to try and make it sound as huge as the records I loved. I wish I could say it was good or even interesting, like some accidental shoegaze masterpiece, but it wasn’t. But, I fell in love with song-writing and DIY recording and that love persists, even if it’s mainly unrequited.

What are some themes you try to express through your music? ‘Dancing With Chains’ is one of my favourites from the album. Can you reveal anything about the inspiration behind it?

Alienation, love, technology, delusions, faith, ego, sin, paralysis, solipsism, empire, ya know, just the small stuff, nothing too ambitious.  ‘Dancing with Chains’ is about screaming into the spiritual void and having the echoes harvested and sold back to you as nostalgic trinkets. Or, in other words, how capitalism is so totalising that it treats its supposed enemies simply as new market transaction opportunities. I heard this Bill Hicks quote about how easy it is to turn our brains off and numb out now that we’ve got “56 channels of American Gladiators” who can be our avatars for actual conflict now. And I thought that line would be hilarious in a shoegaze song because I was trying to envision the Venn diagram of Bill Hicks fans and Shoegaze fans.

What artists have you been listening to lately?

There’s a band here in Vancouver called Crack Cloud that I adore. They’re like if Brockhampton was primarily influenced by Gang of Four and they make some of the best music videos I’ve ever seen. I love Alex Cameron. Angel Olsen can do no wrong. Adrianne Lenker from Big Thief is a genius. Matthew Cardinal makes my favourite ambient music. He also helped out with a bunch of synths on this record and is a great human being.

And lastly… do you have any plans to do a UK tour? If so, please put Norwich on your list!

In the works and yes, we will see you sometime in 2022, Norwich. Our guitarist Murray lives in London, as does my sister, so the UK is a second home for us and we can’t wait to get back there.