Youth Lagoon announces UK tour & drops single "Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)'" taken from new album 'Rarely Do I Dream' on Fat Possum.
Along with newly announced UK and mainland European tour dates, Youth Lagoon, the alias of Idaho-based producer and songwriter Trevor Powers, unveils “Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)”, a final pre-release track leading into this Friday’s release of new album 'Rarely Do I Dream', via Fat Possum.
“Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)” is painted with western tremolo guitars, proto-ambient recordings of dogs barking, family talking, and a distorted drumbeat.
“Someone said my music makes them feel like they died in the forest, and I’ve honestly never heard a better compliment. I don’t think I have a song that’s more suited for that description than ‘Gumshoe.’
I usually write out of pure love, delirium, or just to get the devil off my back, and this one checks all three boxes… it may be the closest I’ve come so far to finding real freedom in music.”
Powers says.
On “Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas),” Powers sings: “It was the world I had // Scenes I wish I never saw // The summer taught me that life’s a baseball bat to the jaw.” In Powers’ words, the song is
“a love letter to my 1990s small-town boyhood, taking all of those fragments of memory and stitching them into a present-day folktale.
I grew up homeschooled in a house full of brothers where there was enough mischief and make-believe to make any mother crack. Our world was whatever we wanted it to be, and I don’t think that ever changed for me.”
The self-directed video for “Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)” is
“a stew of home movies, family archive, and footage I took just a few months ago around my current neighborhood.”
Youth Lagoon's latest offering 'Rarely Do I Dream' is a treasure trove of home movies, twangy fuzz guitars, sun-bleached synths, classical pianos, blown-out drums, and Powers’ spellbinding melodies, all which feel like an old photograph that’s been reanimated in a strange and distant future.
In the fall of 2023, Powers discovered a shoebox filled with home videos in his parents’ basement.
“When I took the tapes home and popped in the first one, it was my brother Bobby and I at the state fair. I was 4 years old choking on a corn dog,”
he laughs.
“If anything’s a summary of life, that is.”
Powers spent the following week recording his favorite moments off the TV, Easter egg hunts, backyard baseball, bloody noses, birthday parties, road trips, and all the life in-between. The vivid intimacies of life and boyhood depicted in Powers’ home movies began shaping and infusing with his songs.
He started sampling the audio and manipulating it into a kind of musical cinematography, fusing past with future.
“What I was really consumed with was how much I could zoom in on my actual history,”
says Powers.
“I wanted to really make someone feel like they were inside my living room in 1993, but rearrange the furniture a bit. Something about combining that level of hyperreality with fairytales of devils and detectives weirdly felt like the truest way to immortalize these pieces of my family.”
Rooted in love and childhood memoir, 'Rarely Do I Dream' is a triumph of American gothic imagination, where storybook innocence dissolves into a radioactive billow of teenage drifters, drug-addled hustlers, and old-world folklore.
Drifting between propulsive electronica and hallucinatory rock songs, Powers’ singular voice always glows front and center as the neon road sign pointing home.
Youth Lagoon marks the release of the new album announcing the following UK and European live dates for later in the year - dates below. The shows will be his first European dates since 2023, when he played sold out headline concerts for the London, Paris and Berlin editions of Pitchfork Festival.
Photo by Tyler T. Williams
Tour Dates
June 03 - Barcelona, Spain - Sala Apolo / Primavera Sound -Primavera A La Ciutat
June 04 - Bordeaux, France - Le Rocher de Palmer
June 08 - Zurich, Switzerland - Exil
June 10 - Vienna, Austria - B72
June 11 - Prague, Czechia - MeetFactory
June 12 - Berlin, Germany - Frannz Club
June 13 - Cologne, Germany - Helios 37
June 17 - Paris, France - Le Trabendo
June 18 - Antwerp, Belgium - Trix Club
June 19 - London, United Kingdom - Islington Assembly Hall