Fast times for a slowburn

I really like the band Young the Giant. I discovered them thanks to the idiosyncrasies of the streaming age, in that they kept appearing on my song radios and playlists until I realised that they were the masterminds behind all my favourite songs. My Body. Superposition. Simplify. Cough Syrup. It’s anthemic indie pop rock and that’s my jam. I feel like I’ve been looking forward to their new album, Victory Garden, for an age. It dropped May 1.

I listened a couple of times on the day of release and found it a bit forgettable. Bobs and I listened together and discussed the fact that it felt too familiar, somehow. It’s comfortable music, and that didn’t make me want to listen more. A week passed and I moved onto other things.

This morning I was listening to a Glass Animals-inspired playlist while walking the dog and it happened again — every good song I didn’t know turned out to be Young the Giant. I resolved to give Victory Garden another try and it’s been on repeat ever since (sorry, family). I’ve pored over the lyrics. I’ve followed the band on instagram. I’ve listened to lead singer Sameer Gadhia’s podcast in which he interviews musicians of colour from around the world.

The thing that hooked me about Victory Garden in the end is its intention. The band created it as an antidote to the exact modern feelings that caused me to overlook it upon first listen: overstimulation, exhaustion, numbness, cynicism. The members are all about my age (or a bit younger, let’s be honest), and many of them have young families. They tried to see the world again through the eyes of their children. They tried to capture the essence of all the good and hopeful things about being alive.

I had this very intense epiphany while listening to the fourth track, Already There, that the whole project was about the beauty and terror of middle life. When you reach this arbitrary midpoint and realise you spent the first half of your life living in expectation of some kind of pinnacle, and then one day it hits you that there isn’t going to be one. Instead there’s just the awe and mundanity of the everyday. You realise this is it, now is the pinnacle, if you choose it. You finally understand that the present moment has been what you were looking for all along — there was never a need to strive for it because it was already there.

I think Victory Garden is about choosing to fall in love with your life, but very specifically through the eyes of a middle-aged person. Victory gardens were a social movement in the US during WWII — a way for people to contribute to the war effort by growing fruit and vegetables in their own backyards and in public spaces in order to reduce load on the national food supply. The focus was on collective effort for collective benefit. Community and coming together. Finding hopeful moments in dark times. This album is the same — the sound of a conscious effort to cultivate of love for the moment you’re in, and all the people and choices that led you to it.

I caught up with an old friend this week and we ended up spending an hour talking about his love life. He’s a little younger than me and a couple of years deep into a relationship he thought was ‘the one’. He’s no longer certain that he and his girlfriend want the same things (if they ever did). Personally, I think the combination of chemistry + shared values + unified hopes and dreams is pure dumb luck, but if those stars do align and you choose forever with a person there’s nothing remotely lucky about relationship longevity, only graft. I told him that making a life-long commitment to someone means waking up everyday and choosing to love and accept them completely, all the versions — who they were, who they are, who they’re becoming. It really is no joke. I said if he couldn’t wake up and do that today then there was probably no point in pursuing his relationship. Was that harsh? That was a long anecdote to explain why I found myself teary-eyed during track 10, The Garden.

In their instagram post about the new album release, Young the Giant explained it in a way that really touched me (once I got past the therapy speak):

“It’s an album about radical empathy, community, and seeing the world through the eyes of our children.”

“… making the Victory Garden has been our own beacon of hope amidst the ever changing world we live in. We only wish that it can be the same for you, and that you can pass it on.”

“We did not chase inspiration, but let it find us. And when it did, we dug deep in the desert and the mountains to let it guide us. Most of that meant doing deep internal work as a group, not even thinking about music. Instead we talked about love, family, eternal truths and illusions, fears, trauma and loss. We reconnected as brothers.

“And then the music flowed like water, because ‘the wound is the place where the light enters you.’ That is the Victory Garden.”

This has been quite the profound and emotional rabbit hole to travel down on a rainy Saturday, and now I’m concerned about my inability to allow adequate time and space for slowburn music in 2026. I so nearly missed this. What else have I let pass me by as I bounce from one new thing to the next like a pinball? I’ve said before that these days I need more to dive deeper — more context, narrative, hooks. I can’t blame myself for this, it’s the reality of the moment we’re living in. The irony is that it’s re-wired my brain to make it incredibly difficult to actually be present in the moment. There’s so much to engage with and consume that capturing my attention is difficult enough, and keeping it is almost impossible.

I’m not sure what to do about any of this. I have no conclusions to draw. Maybe more deep breaths are needed? Less snap judgement? A smidgen more self-awareness?

One thing’s for sure: I need to go and give Noah Kahan’s new album another try.