Stream: Young the Giant, ‘Act II: Exile’

Kevin Bronson on August 14th, 2022

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“I was just a kid from nowhere / Never knew where I belong / You were in the family, house up in the country / Blue-blooded American,” Sameer Gadhia sings in “My Way,” the first on Young the Giant’s EP-sized “Act II: Exile.”

The four-song release is the second of the four-part rollout of the Orange County quintet’s fifth album, “American Bollywood,” out Oct. 21. Young the Giant introduced the album in June with the single “Wake Up,” released “Act I: Origins” in July and have now followed with “Act II.” Eight songs in, “American Bollywood” has all the makings of an epic, its aching romanticism and yearning contextualized by the storyline: a multi-generational saga of the American immigrant.

The pop grandeur of “Act II’s” “My Way” and “The Walk Home” are but two examples.

As Gahia, the son of Indian immigrants, has said: “[The album] is not just the story of an Indian-American caught in between two worlds. It’s also our universal search to find meaning in chaos.”

Of “Act II,” he says, “For the world, our pandemic exile has been a new reality we are still reeling from. We wonder if things will ever go back: if we can un-see what we were forced to in the mirror of isolation. But for the immigrant, exile is a voluntary sacrifice for opportunity: The loss of homeland is a pining that is always there, even subconsciously in the children of immigrants, whose parents loss is just a formless ghost that causes trauma rippling across generations.”

The band — Gahia, (vocals), Jacob Tilley (guitar), Eric Cannata (guitar), Francois Comtois (drums) and Payam Doostzadeh (bass) — worked with producer John Hill (Santigold, M.I.A, Phantogram, Khalid) on the album, their first since 2018’s “Mirror Master.”

||| Stream: “My Way” and “The Walk Home”