Heavy Heavy – Young Fathers (2023)

Right from the start of Heavy Heavy, Scottish genre-transcenders Youth Fathers break the mold they established on Cocoa Sugar by dragging the listener into a drum circle. Tambourines, acoustic instrumentation, and jubilant rhythms crowd the room in “Rice.” Gospel forms the backbone of the track, with rumination on a primitive sense of fundamental human needs (“I need to catch more fish, baby / I need to eat more rice”) segueing into hope and empowerment as the singer repeats, “These hands can heal!”

Joy in perseverance is the manifesto of Heavy Heavy. Rather than delving deeper in the mellow and moody catastrophizing of their last album, Young Fathers preach a spirit of found purpose in the hardships they (and we) have faced. Their ecstasy of endurance gels with similar excursions from artists like The Weeknd and Beyoncé who made a point of following their darkest and most ambitious projects with songs that snapped their audiences out of the doom and gloom of the pandemic and reminded them: “We used to dance. We can dance. We can dance out of joy of the sheer fact that we can dance after all we have been through.”

What Young Fathers bring to the table (as they always have) compared to those artists is the strength of perspective. “I Saw” encapsulates this best with its defiant and determined screams against an Orwellian machine of gaslighting. In the five years leading up to Heavy Heavy, we all know what we have seen with disturbing clarity, and many of us are still walking the line in whatever paths life has made available to us. The world has insisted that it will march forward regardless of the damage we have seen, and we are forced to keep up the pace for fear of being left behind. In many ways, what happens to those left behind is the core of what we have witnessed. Complacency, resignation, and hopelessness have never felt as sensible as they did in recent years, but Heavy Heavy stands opposed to these compulsions with resolve. It is a cold splash of water in the face followed by a golden sunrise, a reminder that every day alive under the Sword of Damocles is one where life is the victor – as long as there are those willing to claim the victory.

★★★★