Sydney, AU · indie-rock · heartland-rock

Gang of Youths

1 upcoming festival

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, whose lyrics draw heavily on personal experience — illness and mortality in a first marriage, religious upbringing and doubt, and his Samoan family history. The band's early records paired those subjects with widescreen guitar rock, and later work brought in strings, horns and choral arrangements alongside samples of Pacific Islander vocal music.

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.

indie-rockheartland-rock