Gang of Youths

Gang of Youths
With support from The Sophs

Wednesday, March 31
Doors: 7:00 PM
All ages
The Grand at The Complex
On sale: Friday, November 20 at 10:00 AM

This event has tiered pricing in the General Admission area. All General Admission tiers have the same access. Once a price level sells out, it may no longer be visible or available for selection. Multiple GA price levels may be available at the same time.

For the first time, Gang Of Youths were doing alright. The quartet’s frontman and primary songwriter, David Le’aupepe, had spent ten years mining the heaviest experiences of his life for music known for visceral catharsis and open-hearted vulnerability. But after the first three Gang Of Youths albums, Le’aupepe and his bandmates—Jung Kim (keys, guitar), Donnie Borzestowski (drums), and Tom Hobden (violin, guitar, keys)—found themselves relatively content. The next Gang Of Youths album would no longer be a diaristic exploration of trauma, identity, and grief. It called for a near-complete overhaul of how they made music, resulting in their fourth album, Compañero.

“I had this realization that I didn’t need to channel all this brutality anymore,” Le’aupepe says. “I used to do that out of some shame about being an artist. But I began looking at my life and experience, and began to think that making art is a worthwhile thing to continue exploring in itself.”

Since their 2015 debut, The Positions, Gang Of Youths have developed a kaleidoscopic style influenced by their multiracial and multicultural heritage, built around big emotions and big sounds. They earned acclaim in Australia, including ARIA and J Awards nominations. Their 2017 album, Go Farther In Lightness, was a breakthrough, winning four ARIA Awards and bringing the band wider recognition abroad. In an era dominated by smaller-scale indie bands, Gang Of Youths stood out with bombastic, expansive music: the darkness in their lyrics countered by soaring choruses and volcanic instrumentation. On 2022’s Angel In Realtime, Le’aupepe processed his father’s death and explored his Samoan identity through skyscraping melodies. Five years later, the band decided it was time for something different, and that Compañero would open a new chapter.

Le’aupepe first had to overcome writer’s block, which became an artistic challenge. “I had never really developed the instinct to take my own perception of the world and apply it to stories and songs that weren’t a hundred percent about what I’m going through,” he says. “I had to embrace the identity of actually being a songwriter and musician.” He revisited favorite artists for inspiration, including Leonard Cohen, Warren Zevon, Tom Waits, David Berman, and Bill Callahan. Rather than purging his own demons, Le’aupepe sought erudite lyrics, tighter structures, and classic pop melodies blended with old-school Americana.

Much of the initial writing took place in the garden behind Hobden’s London home. Compañero reflects that setting and a shift in the band’s emotions and approach. Le’aupepe drew inspiration from mid-century crooners, the Laurel Canyon folk-rock community of the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the desert highways of the American Southwest. The band also took cues from spaghetti westerns, retro-futurism, surrealism, and Blue Note records.

Once Le’aupepe brought sketches to Kim, Borzestowski, and Hobden, the band began shaping Compañero. “The writing process was fairly arduous, but ultimately freeing,” Kim recalls. “The most difficult stage was discerning what the hell we wanted to make.” The album brings together different strains of Americana in a subtler, gentler sound. “We were so used to writing from this place of overt earnestness and sincerity, but we felt like we’d grown out of the need to make something overly rambunctious,” Kim says. “We wanted to experiment with arrangements that were more refined, more lean. Every element had to earn its place on this record.”

The band recorded in several UK studios, working with in-house engineer Robert Sellens at Decoy Studios and holding additional sessions, primarily produced and engineered by Kim, at Redchurch, Urchin, Hoxa, and Cloud 9—the nickname for the mini-studio in Hobden’s backyard. They let the influences they loved mingle rather than chasing one style or genre. “It’s rare for our songs to take shape quickly,” Borzestowski explains. “Usually there are months of reworks, edits, re-tracking, scrapping, redoing the song, then scrapping it again.” On Compañero, that rigorous editing went hand in hand with a sense of adventure and looseness.

“We’re actually incredibly goofy and light-hearted, and I think we wanted this to be felt in what we made next,” Kim says. The band recorded as much of Compañero live as possible, bringing a collaborative, freewheeling energy to the material and giving the songs a warm, lived-in tone.

Though the music often feels unburdened, the band has lost none of its ambition or scope. “Most of the album is a meditation on death, and the different forms in which death presents in our life,” Le’aupepe says. The title can translate to variations of “friend”; Le’aupepe also considered death an ever-present companion.

That theme appears in the gruesome car crash scene of “Street Value” and in “Benny’s Video,” whose propulsive synth churn reflects the influence of the Michael Haneke film of the same name. More often, Le’aupepe’s vocals are conversational, and the music is welcoming, leaving space for reflections on mortality that are more abstract and spiritual than the “gaping wounds” of earlier albums.

“I think we’ve established by now that mortality and death are never going to be far from the surface of a Gang Of Youths song, but the prism through which they’re observed has shifted,” Hobden says. “You might as well face death with a wry smile, because you can’t outrun it. The darkness doesn’t need to diminish the warmth, and the warmth doesn’t have to disguise the darkness. There’s no reason a record about death shouldn’t also be a celebration of being alive, however ridiculous and unremarkable that might sometimes be.”

The album moves across a range of styles: “Desert Life Museum” turns lounge pop into an arid shuffle; “Manila ’98” is a barn-burner; “Future Be Kind” is a sprawling epic; “This Machine, It’s A Classic” blends jazz-pop and baroque art-rock; and “Yeyu” has a languid groove. The band’s 2026 single “Things Take Time” offers a glimpse of the new horizons they pursue on Compañero.

Compañero offers no specific conclusion. Instead, it becomes a tapestry of vignettes, with its open-ended nature part of the point. “Real life doesn’t dictate anything, it just throws things at you and expects you to trip over them occasionally,” Le’aupepe says. “That’s how I want to create, and to enjoy my life and my relationships. It’s always a process of becoming.”