WATCH AND SHARE “ONCE” HERE
NEW LP, YOUTH., OUT TODAY SEPTEMBER 7
UPDATED CANADIAN TOUR DATES BEGIN OCT 5
PURCHASE / STREAM YOUTH. HERE
“While boldly declaring “Folk is dead,” Mattson has made an intimate, whisper of a record...Through Mattson and Munroe’s machinations, folk is not dead, but reborn... Put it in the box with other albums that defy description and transcend genres; file it under instant classic and effortless listening.” - Dominionated
“Youth. is a coming-of-age record that seeks to remind us of the dreams we used to have; the people with whom we've lost touch, or who we've lost altogether; and all the other changes that flashed before our eyes. It's designed to reflect the wistful, nostalgic and possibly lost millennial, and its intergenerational sound achieves that and much more.” - Exclaim!
Today, Kalle Mattson is celebrating the release day of his new LP, Youth., with a video for album opener, “Once”. From the double tracked acoustic guitars and vocals, to referencing his heroes and the innocence lost in your mid-20s, “Once” “encapsulates a lot of the sounds and themes of the album,” says Mattson. Dominated claims that “Once” is a “fairytale fractured by youthful angst and anxiety. Filtered through a dreamy, gauzy lens, it sets Youth.’s cinematic tone: a blown-out, indie film album all about realizing that you’ve become an adult while you were busy hanging on to your youth.”
WATCH AND SHARE “ONCE” HERE
Mattson will bring Youth. on the road this fall across Canada. Since announcing the tour dates last month some stops have been updated with new dates. Full tour dates can be found below.
PURCHASE / STREAM YOUTH. HERE
Folk music is about storytelling, which is something Mattson knows well enough. “People latched on to my last album because there was a story,” he says. “Writing in a box was exciting and interesting to me: here’s a theme, so how far can you go with it, and how can you make it seem like a cohesive piece?” For Youth., he set out to write about his time growing up in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, a small border town between Great Lakes Superior and Huron. He credits “the Soo” with giving him ambition—to get the heck out of there.
He wanted to write about his friends who are still there, and about his generation who are now between adolescence and adulthood — the latter being a delayed concept in the modern world, when few people yet feel confident on their life path by age 25. “It’s about when dreams become regrets, all your friends become strangers when you don’t have something binding everyone
together, like school,” he says. “I thought about coming-of- age movies and novels, and couldn’t think of many coming-of-age albums.” That is, except for two of his all-time favourites: Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town.
Sonically, however, Youth. owes more to Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, with a lonely, ghostly timbre to the synths employed by Munroe — who also worked on Mattson’s 2015 EP Avalanche, nominated for a JUNO Award. Munroe dressed up Mattson’s acoustic demos and shared songwriting credit on tracks that are too catchy to be anything but pure pop music. Mixed by Noah Georgeson (Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Andy Shauf), Youth. is a studio record,” says Mattson. “I wanted to give it a specific feeling and vibe, to create its own sonic world.” Those early demos will be released as bonus material, as well as remixes of some tracks; there is also an entire version of Youth. made entirely with synths and drum machines, which was shelved. The proper album is a marriage of the songs’ stark origins and Munroe’s machinations.
WATCH THE ‘FOLK IS DEAD’ SESSION VIDEO FOR “KIDS ON THE RUN”
WATCH AND THE SHARE “KIDS ON THE RUN” OFFICIAL VIDEO HERE
There are ghosts in those machines: ghosts of Mattson’s adolescence in Sault Ste. Marie, just as the Polaris Music Prize nominated Someday The Moon Will Be Gold dealt with the ghost of his mother, and Avalanche dealt with the ghosts of his musical forebears—the video for that EP’s title track, which won the 2016 Prism Prize, features Mattson inserting himself into 35 of his favourite album covers, from Tom Petty and Paul Simon to The Smiths and Jay-Z. On Youth., there’s no trace of a retro vibe: it’s full of Swedish-style pop songs like “Kids on the Run” (“My attempt at writing a millennial anthem,” says Mattson) and 808-and-Heartbreak-ish ballads like “Broken in Two” — but also, yes, a couple of folk songs that bookend Youth., the introductory “Once”, and the sparse, banjo-driven conclusion, “Astronaut.” Folk is dead; long live the folk artist.
WATCH AND SHARE “BROKEN IN TWO” ACOUSTIC SESSION HERE
LISTEN AND SHARE “BROKEN IN TWO” ALBUM VERSION HERE
TOUR DATES
Oct 5 - Sault Ste. Marie, ON - Loplops
Oct 12 - Montreal, QC - Quai Des Brumes
Oct 13 - Quebec City, QC - L’Anti
Oct 23 - Kingston, ON - Grad Club
Oct 24 - Hamilton, ON - Mills Hardware
Oct 25 - St Catharines, ON - Warehouse
Oct 26 - Waterloo, ON - Starlite
Oct 27 - London, ON - Aeolian Hall
Nov 10 - Ottawa, ON - The Studio at NAC
Nov 16 - Burnstown, ON - Neat Cafe
Nov 17 - Toronto, ON - Longboat Hall
Nov 24 - North Bay, ON - Les Compagnons
Nov 28 - Saskatoon, SK - Amigo’s
Nov 29 - Edmonton, AB - Almanac
Nov 30 - Calgary, AB - Festival Hall
Dec 3 - Vancouver, BC - The Fox Theatre
Dec 4 - Victoria, BC - Lucky Bar
Dec 6 - Regina, SK - The Exchange
Dec 7 - Winnipeg, MB - WECC
