“Rise and rise you great old thing,” Dave Le’aupepe sings on ‘Forebearance,’ a standout from Gang Of Youths’ third studio album ‘angel in realtime’, out this week. The eclectic and fragmented five minute track fuses electronic dance with the indie-rock style the band are known and loved for. With contributions from Pasifika and Māori vocalists and instrumentalists, this song (plus the cinematic ‘The Kingdom is Within You’ and ‘Goal of the Century’) sums up the seamless, hymnal quality of the record, as the band ascend into a new era.
In summer 2021, the group marked their return to music after four years with the epic ‘Angel of 8th Ave.’ Whilst they’re fast becoming a phenomenon, they’ve tasted success many times. Multiple records, EPs, Top 10s, and a string of awards, Gang of Youths are now redefining that success.
A lot has changed since the group relocated from Sydney to London at the end of 2017. Between Angel and Hackney, moving to London represented a rebirth, a creative reset and artistic overhaul, shifting their sound and production. With the addition of former Noah & The Whale multi-instrumentalist, Tom Hobden, the band have crafted a record unlike any other they have before.
Gang of Youths in 2022 takes on a magical direction: unearthing samples that embrace indigenous music native to Dave’s Polynesian heritage, uniquely meshed with genres the band grew up on, such as UK garage, drum and bass, and electronic dance. The experimental album centres around the life and legacy of Dave’s father, grief, indigenous identity, marriage, and missed conversations.
Over Zoom, Clash caught up with Dave and Max to discuss creative influences, touring, and the new record.
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Firstly, how are you guys doing? I know it’s been a bit of a wild and exciting time with you finishing off the album, and the tour.
Dave: Yeah, things have been fine. I’ve been home with my wife and dog, I’m not massively into the ‘lifestyle,’ and Max is a parent, we’re not doing that shit, we never really have. So the majority of all of our activities around the band is centred purely on work, and then outside that we tend to just hang out with each other because we’re each other’s family here as we live in London now… That’s the way we look at it.
How was it supporting Sam Fender on his sold-out arena tour? How did you feel spending time with him and his band?
Max: That was fucking great. We got on with those boys for sure. Dave: He’s actually a good friend of mine, they’re fucking Geordies and their experience of working class life echoes experiences of my own.
I think there’s a humour and a sense of ease that comes between us, there’s a natural camaraderie between Australians and Geordies and northern people. You probably find that we have a sort of similar approach to life, a philosophical underpinning and way of approaching people. It was easy to kind of find our space and our place with them, the crew and his whole team were just amazing. Being around him for long extended periods, and because we were mates, sort of made it easier to exist in that sphere… but we don’t think we’re better than anyone else, we just often feel shit in comparison.
You had some great shows last summer, the Lafayette, Neighbourhood Weekender, and All Points East. How has it been, playing live again?
Dave: For me, it was kinda frustrating at times because I have a hard time not being able to jump into the crowd and give people hugs, not meeting fans or not being able to be affectionate, warm, and inviting to people. One of the few things that I love about my job is being in and around the people. But the actual tour itself and playing all those shows was weird because I really fucking enjoyed it, and that was the first time in years I felt that sparkle again.
There’s been a sense of complacency I think with me when it comes to playing and touring (maybe an ennui, I use that word a lot) because I felt like I was on a hamster wheel, partly down to exhaustion of playing the same tracks over and over again. And the person I was five years ago is so different to the person I am now. Five years ago I could tolerate a bunch of touring, and now as I get older I sort of look back and think maybe there was a little bit more stationary life I could’ve had for myself.
But, we are so excited for it to be back, and it’s pretty special to be doing our own shows with Tom. Having Tom in the band just feels really free, even the old songs felt a bit more meaningful to play with him, and it’s the first tour that he’s done even though he’s been in the band for like two years. It felt like there was new life breathed into the old songs because of his addition to the band.
How has it been working in your own studio space, learning how to engineer and produce music together?
Dave: Mate, I’m telling you, being in such proximity with four absolute geniuses is fucking amazing. I was like, “guys, let’s make a drum and bass record about my dad and indigenous identity, but what makes a drum and bass record? Oh, strings! Let’s get a flight to Budapest and make a bunch of musicians play this stuff in Tom’s head.” There’s so much about it that doesn’t really seem congruent with itself I guess, but for some reason it really works, and having Tom helped streamline the process, especially with scoring. So we were building tracks and what I envisioned drums, bass, and strings to sound like, and I know that seems like a weird thing to do, building what’s essentially like a semi dance record.
‘The Kingdom Is Within You’ is almost celestial with all its intricacies and genre-blending, how did that track come about?
Dave: During a conversation with friends, the subject of UK garage came up, resulting with me in the studio playing about with different sounds. It first started out as a joke, like for better or for worse (and mainly for better) UK garage is really one of the most influential genres and scenes to come out of this country. So it was a nice kind of tip of the hat to a very important and underrated movement in British culture that gave birth to like a million different subcultures as a result. The melody of the track was about finding something that had this swagger, and a kind of groove distinctly entrenched in London and English counterculture iconography.
It’s interesting because a lot of the new music made by Pacific islanders heavily references UK drill and UK garage, and it’s interesting that the cross-cultural pollination has been a really significant exchange between our respective countries. ‘The Kingdom Is Within You’ is supposed to reference that sonically, but also this element of big beat, Fatboy Slim, and Chemical Brothers, that sort of influential late noughties dance sound that just seems like it was everywhere because I remember at the time hearing all of that on the FIFA games.
So childhood influences spill heavily into how that song, and others on ‘angel in realtime’ were crafted?
Dave: Yeah, like I discovered so many bands that I love through playing EA Sports games as a kid right, I mean that was the kind of way in which you could hear music in media. It just goes to show how influential the sounds were because they found their way into sports culture, they found their way into cinema, and they became the kind of essential component of the 90s upbringing. I wanted to evoke that. I think because the album is a lot about looking back and looking at the now – and contrasting the two periods, evoking that sense of deep feeling for the past and for memory, more than just nostalgia and sadness, was really important to tell my dad’s story in a way that was kind of fun sounding, and wasn’t just fucking mournful.
The song itself references my dad’s life in New Zealand as a Polynesian migrant worker, but also the experiences of working class people everywhere being exploited unfairly and harassed by the police. Indigenous people, black working class, white working class… everyone in between. It’s not a political gesture, but it’s just about the human experience and the emotions and feelings running through all of our heads as we march off to work and make money for somebody else. Simply put, I wanted to capture these broad big sounds that are familiar and nostalgic, encouraging a sense of longing for a past time that no longer exists.
Max: There’s a sense of two times in most of the songs because they feature samples from David Fanshawe’s field recordings of indigenous Pacific music from the 1980s. So, there’s the real time: Dave right here right now singing to us, and then the backstory and history through the samples. Like the repetitive chanting that you’re hearing is from decades ago, and layered together it sounds multi-generational.
How important has it been to unearth these recordings and connect with them through sampling?
Dave: I wanted all the songs to be surrounded by the voices of my ancestral past and to be like a spiritual weight, for a lack of a better term – people with my skin tone and my heritage, people who were like my father, to shroud the album. The samples are important as they trace back to the beauty our collective cultural identity offers. I adore the idea of sampling and assembling things together and just chucking together loops and weird stuff, because it’s like taking fragments and making mosaics, which is cool.
What is your favourite song(s) on the record?
Dave: I don’t have a favourite song, but what I do have is a sense that I don’t hate any of the music on this album, for the first time in my whole career. I guess in the upper echelon would be ‘Forebearance,’ I loved singing that one.
Max: Yeah, so much of this album is so lucky that it worked – like ‘Forebearance’ was excellent, producing that track was so easy because it just glides.
Dave: I wanted the album to not feel like that it just coasted, but had a real arc to it, gliding through the air. So much of it is challenging and multi-layered, multi-syllabic and intertextual, and pretentious in a lot of ways because I’m constantly being meta and talking about the actions of writing and singing. But I didn’t want to make people feel overwhelmed with the unnecessary complexities and musical intricacies that I think we were pretty tempted into doing early on. Stripping back all of that and finding the moments to be mathy and complex and innovative in terms of meter and time gives people that feeling that it can be played both as background noise and also as an immediate straight-up listen.
Also, basically all the songs are like me talking to my father. Or about him in some proxy way. There’s this conversational relational element and the people who did that really well lyrically are like Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, and Matt Berninger, in the way they phrase and place words just on a technical level. Our song ‘Forebearance’ is me trying to do all that shit correctly, and I don’t think I fucked it up, honestly for the first time in a long time.
The new songs are really cathartic, and as the last couple of years has allowed time for introspection, what is one thing you hope fans and listeners will take away from the upcoming album?
Dave: I would like people to call their dad or their mum or whoever or whatever good person, cause a lot of people don’t have good parents, so whatever good person is in their life I want them to call them and that’s the one thing I wish I could do with my old man. That’s the thing I keep telling people, make sure to call that person, whoever it is. I think that’s what the album is about… and more than anything, it’s about my dad.
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‘angel in realtime’ is out on February 25th. Gang of Youths will start their headline UK/EU tour this March.
Words: Sahar Ghadirian
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