Stream: Young Galaxy, ‘Catch Your Breath’

S.Lo on March 26th, 2018

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Montreal synth-wave duo Young Galaxy (Stephen Ramsay and Catherine McCandless) have gone rogue from the music industry machine and have decided to self-release their upcoming album, “Down Time,” on April 6.

The title has multiple meanings for the group, a time of rest and a time of darkness. Either way, “It feels time to get up against what feels most valuable to us, yet again: love, art, subversion, risk and vulnerability. The music industry needs it, politics need it, people need it. It’s love and sex and comfort and blood and unity amongst seekers on the outside of what seems to be an absurd and lonely state of normalcy currently,” McCandless says.

The album, their sixth full-length, is a sonic journey in deep synths and echoing melody lines that together evoke both an escape to serenity and confronting a wall of waves. Last year, they released the track “Stay for Real,” with all proceeds going toward Pivot Legal Society (Canada), ACLU National (U.S.) and W.A.V.E. (EU). Against a bass and beat-heavy musical landscape with echoes of Aphex Twin and Depeche Mode, McCandless sings, “Everything’s changing / But we gotta stay for real / And the way that we speak is coming out differently / Nothing we wish for/Ever comes easily… Don’t be vain / Don’t swallow the bloom…”

Their latest single, “Catch Your Breath” glistens with a powerful undercurrent driving through with an electronic bodhrán warrior beat. McCandless sets her intention for this energy, singing, “Catch your breath and transgress / We’ll make more here with less / Hold my tongue to a song/And let go of words when words steer us wrong.” Both she and Ramsay effectively transport listeners away from the darkness of these times while offering a safe place to confront it. “I think we are putting out into the world powers and vulnerabilities that could be the balm, or even antidote to it,” she says. Like a meditation, with words then beyond words, Young Galaxy takes us above the static.

||| Stream: “Catch Your Breath” and “Under My Wing”