Sydney, AU · indie-rock · heartland-rock

Gang of Youths

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Australian band writing enormous, unembarrassed songs about faith, grief, and staying alive — Springsteen-scale sincerity delivered by one of the great live frontmen.

Gang of Youths formed in Sydney in 2013 around singer and songwriter David Le'aupepe, joined from the start by guitarist and keyboardist Jung Kim, with drummer Donnie Borzestowski arriving in 2014 and violinist and keyboardist Tom Hobden in 2020. Le'aupepe met early bandmate Joji Malani as children at a Sydney church, and later crossed paths with Kim and eventual bassist Max Dunn at school in Mosman.

Le'aupepe's lyrics draw heavily on personal experience: illness and mortality in a first marriage, a religious upbringing and doubt, and his Samoan family history. The band's early records paired those subjects with widescreen guitar rock.

Later work brought in strings, horns and choral arrangements alongside samples of Pacific Islander vocal music, most audibly on 2022's Angel in Realtime, which was followed by Immolation Tape, an EP of acoustic versions of the same songs.

Their 2015 debut album The Positions reached number five in Australia and produced the platinum single "Magnolia," widely cited as their breakthrough. Go Farther in Lightness, released in 2017, went to number one and won four awards at that year's ARIA Awards including Album of the Year, while three of its songs placed in the top ten of the Triple J Hottest 100.

The group relocated to London for a period and built much of its reputation on live performance, where Le'aupepe's between-song monologues and physical presence are as much a part of the show as the songs. Comparisons to Bruce Springsteen and The National recur, largely because of the scale of the arrangements and the plainness of the emotional writing.

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indie-rockheartland-rock