Rarely Do I Dream, Youth Lagoon’s fifth album, blends the nostalgic, the gothic, and the otherworldly into spellbinding alien Americana.
Youth Lagoon, the critically lauded project of singer-songwriter-producer Trevor Powers, broke out in 2011 with their debut album, The Year of Hibernation, which was praised as both an exemplar of and a departure from the flowering bedroom pop movement. Powers released two more albums as Youth Lagoon before announcing the “death” of the project in 2015; he went on to release two records under his name, in which he experimented with harsher production and found sound. In 2023, Powers revived Youth Lagoon with the mortality-concerned Heaven Is a Junkyard after a protracted medical episode.
Powers called Boise, Idaho, home all along, and its influence is especially legible on this record. Rarely Do I Dream is peppered with snippets of the home videos Powers found in his parents’ basement that catalyzed the album, but also with pops of suburban folklore and a sublime soundscape that defamiliarizes the nostalgic.
The “Neighborhood Scene” opener is a twisted tribute to Powers’ hometown. He writes of county fairs and of “lighting the bomb,” “every angel and devil out marchin’ on the lawn,” and wondering whether to tell a friend he “saw his dad at the ‘No Romance’ bunny ranch.” On “Football,” he sings that “Momma turned to dust” and neighbor Mary “would fuck the preacher if he only paid enough.” “Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)” recounts a murder in town one summer that marries pulp and magical realism. These small-town archetypes feel in community with those of Father John Misty or early Kacey Musgraves, albeit with a morbid fixation that marks them firmly gothic.
Pastoral lyrics are also shaken up with disorienting production. Since The Age of Hibernation over a decade ago, Youth Lagoon has consistently delivered whispered existential agonies set against colossal soundscapes. Whereas that debut took an earnest loner’s approach to Boise adolescence with sweetly anthemic composition, Rarely Do I Dream regards the same period with corrupted eyes and a consciously nostalgic sound that’s somehow both stranger and more familiar. “Speed Freak” conjures late-night cruising around the eddies of suburbia in a hand-me-down car, dark neighborhood roads, and crumpled Monster cans on the passenger side floor. Yet the way it roams, pulses, and probes, punctuated by Powers’ tinny growl, makes its classic scene feel as severe, otherworldly, and sublime as Antarctica. The same could be said of the American West; wherever one looks, one can see the horizon or the beauty and fearsomeness of the Rockies without seeing another soul, inspiring a strange existential awareness.
The resulting liminal feeling—of getting lost between the intimate and the vast—spans the record, which holds listeners tightly in Youth Lagoon’s ghostly world as it ventures delightfully into indie-rock territory. Traces of The Neighborhood’s moody brush of adolescence meet the lush atmospherics of The xx (who Powers’ co-producer Rodaidh McDonald also produced) to create a tightly aesthetically focused yet remarkably varied runtime. The dregs of power pop appear in “Lucy Takes a Picture,” as does a watery steel drum on “Football,” and moments of jazzy piano pop in throughout. For listeners not yet acclimated to Youth Lagoon, Powers’ rusty vocals can meddle in that broad, confident production; they suddenly materialize and tinnily whisper nearly incomprehensible lyrics over the shoulder.
Yet that contrast serves the uncanny nature of the record, which holds foils in tension — the intimate and the remote, the archetypal and the disorienting — to craft an arresting work of alien Americana.
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