Tyler T. Williams
Seven years after the official termination of Trevor Powers’ beloved solo project Youth Lagoon, he’s returned under the same moniker to announce a new album titled Heaven Is a Junkyard. The news comes with the record’s lead single, “Idaho Alien.”
Despite the infinite ways the world has changed since 2016, the apparent finality of Powers’ statement that Youth Lagoon was “a space i no longer inhabit, nor want to inhabit,” and the ambient left turn he made for the two records he released in the intervening years under his given name, the new track hits with the same heartbreak-pop beauty that infused his 2011 debut, The Year of Hibernation. “I don’t remember how it happened / Blood filled up the clawfoot bath,” he sings in the hook, invoking a moment of extreme pain in his small, gentle way as comfy piano chords and a subtly soothing rhythm section pulse in the background.
In a press release announcing the forthcoming record, which is due out June 9 via Fat Possum, Powers goes into detail about his reasons for ending Youth Lagoon when he did, and for bringing it back. “I felt like I was in a chokehold,” he writes. “Even though it was my music, I lost my way. In a lot of ways, I lost myself.” But in 2021, after suffering a nightmarish reaction to over-the-counter medication that rendered him unable to speak for an extended period, he stepped back into his old name to write again, turning his attention from the global to the local: “Family, neighbors, and grim reapers,” he explains. “I’ve always written about far away things, but the best material has been right in front of me this whole time in Idaho.”
Still, his capacious songwriting style can’t help but touch on universal themes. “Heaven Is a Junkyard is about all of us,” he writes. “It’s stories of brothers leaving for war, drunk fathers learning to hug, mothers falling in love, neighbors stealing mail, cowboys doing drugs, friends skipping school, me crying in the bathtub, dogs catching rabbits, and children playing in tall grass.”
Watch Tyler T. Williams’ visual treatment for “Idaho Alien” (a cinematic affair that stars Powers and a lonesome desert drifter) and check out Heaven Is a Junkyard’s cover art and tracklist below.
Heaven Is a Junkyard album art
Heaven Is a Junkyard tracklist
1. Rabbit
2. Idaho Alien
3. Prizefighter
4. The Sling
5. Lux Radio Theatre
6. Deep Red Sea
7. Trapeze Artist
8. Mercury
9. Little Devil from the Country
10. Helicopter Toy
