Young Guv Announces New Double Album ‘GUV III & IV’
Young Guv Announces New Double Album
GUV III & IVGUV III
Due Out 03/11/22
via Run For Cover Records and Hand Drawn Dracula (Canada)
Preorders Available Now
Shares New Single/Music Video “Lo Lo Lonely“
US 2021 Tour w/ Narrow HeadUK and EU 2022 Tour
Young Guv, aka songwriter Ben Cook, has returned with the announcement of his new double album GUV III & IV. The first installment, GUV III, is due out March 11th from Run For Cover Records (and Hand Drawn Dracula in Canada) and it’s an absolute power pop masterpiece. Packed from front to back with undeniable hooks and crunchy guitars, the record offers Cook’s most instantly gratifying songs yet.
Young Guv has kicked off release with a bang, sharing the album’s massive first single “Lo Lo Lonely.” With its overdriven chords, stomping beat, and anthemic chorus, “Lo Lo Loney” is the kind of swaggering guitar pop anthem that would make a Gallagher brother proud.
Watch the “Lo Lo Lonely” music video:
Listen to “Lo Lo Lonely” everywhere:
Preorder GUV III:
Young Guv has been a long-running project that’s allowed Cook (currently in No Warning, formerly in Fucked Up for the past 15 years) to explore countless different sounds and styles–from scrappy first wave punk to ’80s influenced R&B and beyond–with the one constant being Cook’s infallible knack for melody. But with GUV III the prolific songwriter has inadvertently created the perfect entry point for new listeners and loyal fans alike. The album is an expertly crafted celebration of big choruses and big guitars that packs an emotional punch amongst all the chiming 12-strings and harmonies. Written in the high desert of Taos, New Mexico under unusual circumstances, GUV III finds Cook tapping into physical and mental isolation to explore the unshakeable pull of human connection and the rejuvenating power of finding love in others and one’s self.
Young Guv has a lengthy run of shows lined up in support of GUV III, starting with a US tour with Narrow Head in November, and then heading to Europe and the UK early next year. See full itinerary below.
Stay tuned for more details on GUV IV, also due out in 2022!
GUV III is due out March 11th 2022 via Run For Cover Records. Digital advances are available for review upon request, the artist is available for interviews. Please email james@letsgopublicity.com.
GUV III track list:
1. Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried
2. It’s Only Dancing
3. Lo Lo Lonely
4. Only Wanna See U Tonite
5. Good Time
6. Take Up All My Time
7. But I Ain’t Got U
8. Same Old Fool
9. She Don’t Cry For Anyone
10. Scam Likely
11. April Of My Life
Upcoming Shows:
11/04/21 Birmingham, AL @ Seasick Records *
11/05/21 Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade *
11/06/21 Nashville, TN @ High Watt *
11/08/21 Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle *
11/09/21 Richmond, VA @ The Camel *
11/10/21 Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar *
11/12/21 Brooklyn, NY @ Saint Vitus *
11/13/21 Cambridge, MA @ Hardcore Stadium *
11/14/21 Philadelphia, PA @ Foto Club *
11/15/21 Syracuse, NY @ The Vineyard *
11/16/21 Detroit, MI @ The Sanctuary *
11/17/21 Cleveland, OH @ Now That’s Class *
11/18/21 Chicago, IL @ Subterranean *
11/19/21 Lake Saint Louis, MO @ Sink Hole *
11/20/21 Memphis, TN @ Growlers *
11/21/21 Oklahoma City, OK @ 89th Street OKC *
11/22/21 Dallas, TX @ Cheapsteaks
11/23/21 Austin, TX @ Yellow Jacket Social Club
03/23/22 Copenhagen, Denmark @ Loppen
03/24/22 Arhus C, Denmark @ Atlas
03/25/22 Hamburg, Germany @ Molotow
03/26/22 Warszawa, Poland @ Chmury
03/27/22 Prague, Czech Republic @ Cross Club
03/28/22 Berlin, Germany @ Badehaus Berlin
03/29/22 Koln, Germany @ MTC Club
03/30/22 Paris, France @ Supersonic
03/31/22 Bruxelles, Belgium @ Le Botanique
04/01/22 Amsterdam, Netherlands @ Paradiso
04/03/22 Brighton, UK @ Prince Albert
04/04/22 Leeds, UK @ Hyde Park Book Club
04/06/22 Liverpool, UK @ Jacaranda Records Phase 1
04/07/22 Manchester, UK @ Yes
04/09/22 London, UK @ The Lexington
* w/ Narrow Head
Biography:
In the spring of 2020, Ben Cook — a.k.a. Young Governor, Young Guv, or just Guv — was holed up in the New Mexico high desert, his U.S. tour having been abruptly covid-cancelled during a southwest swing. He and his bandmates were living moment to moment in something called an Earthship, a solar-rigged adobe structure sustainably constructed with, among other things, recycled bottles and tires. And out there in the serene vastness, as a short ride-it-out stint turned into a nine-month sojourn, Ben was writing music, slowly, little by little, mostly at night while the others slept. By the New Year, almost in spite of himself, he had created a new album, two new albums actually, and through the ordeal he was forever changed.
In a place he never expected to be, under circumstances no one could have predicted, and in the face of physical isolation, emotional desolation, and existential dread, Ben created GUV III & IV, a collection of songs dedicated and testifying to the eternal healing power of love — how to find it in the the world, in others, and most importantly, in himself. Written in the New Mexico wilderness and produced in Los Angeles, the double album will be released on Run For Cover later next year.
In New Mexico, daily life was ad hoc, communal, idyllic, almost Utopian. Ben and his five bandmates shared everything, all their money, shelter, and meals (Ben did the cooking). “It was beautiful,” he says. “We were at the foot of the Taos Mountain, part of the Sangre de Cristo range, one of the seven sacred mountain ranges in the world. I swam in the Rio Grande every day. The memory is surreal.”
Work was different — much more daunting. Though the marooned sextet had built themselves a makeshift studio for their little clay casa, inspiration was slow and sporadic. “I was isolated, the world was in complete chaos,” Ben says. “I lost control of the routine that I thrive in. I worked on songs more randomly, only when I felt like it. I was hard on myself for not writing enough. Truthfully, I don’t even remember doing most of it. I was removed from the process, in a way, somehow alienated from my own creativity.”
Isolation amid chaos, a thrumming feeling of alienation from oneself and others — this wasn’t exactly new territory. Two years ago, when Ben released his last record, the double-album set called GUV I & II, he likened the songs to “people-watching in a foreign country in the morning.” He was talking about the loneliness of living in the modern world, a condition that, for most people, was intensifying even before 2020.
And it went back further than the previous album cycle. Ben’s been at this a long time, making music and doing the thing that artists do: noticing what goes in the world, in all its discontents, while everyone else plays dumb. He formed his first serious band, No Warning, in 1998, and over the course of their initial eight-year run they became legends, the Toronto teenagers who perfected New York hardcore, channelling all the anger, resentment, and confusion of that awful War on Terror period, which everyone wanted to forget even as it was happening. Then he spent the rest of the 2000s and 2010s as a guitarist in Fucked Up, who among their contemporaries were unequalled in their intellectual ambition, their capacity to sublimate all that anger and alienation into something profound, erudite, and redemptively strange.
“Guv” has been Ben’s personal songwriting outlet since 2008. Under that name and its derivatives he’s issued a pile of singles and EPs and several full-lengths. Before 2020, Ben says, the songs tended to come, if not easily, then at least efficiently, regularly, reliably, owing to a work ethic he describes as “a bit maniacal.”
But out in the desert, where nothing was familiar (“The energy there was unlike anything I’d experienced”), it was as if he was living outside himself. The old processes he had relied on, the patterns that had prevailed in his former life, no longer seemed to apply. And so they had to change. Given narrowing outer horizons — the shrinking of social life to just five fellow campesinos, the looming prospects of a ruined career and a collapsing society — Ben was forced to broaden his inner horizons, to spend long days and nights under the giant sky figuring out what actually matters and what’s really been inside people’s heads, his and everyone else’s, during these past years of decadence and decline.
Accordingly, the new songs are marked by a sense of intense yearning to connect — with other people, other beings, other energies — and to achieve by those means a measure of inner peace. The very first verse of very first track, “Couldn’t Leave U if I Tried,” whose opening guitar lines are pure-cut Roger McGuinn-esque arpeggiated bliss a la Guv, sets the tone and establishes the stakes:
I treasure the feeling
Forever like a sunbeam on my bed
Your light so sweetly beamin’
Made rainbows on the pillow by my head
Again and again, in song after song — which range widely in style and mood, from Laurel Canyon jangle to British Invasion blues-pop to AM-radio Americana to the mildly sleazy electro pop that is something of a signature — we hear variations on the theme of those opening lines: If, as seems likely, we’re moving from a “love is all you need” world to a “love is all you can have” world, then what’s to be done except “watch the fireflies like bubbles in champagne,” as Ben sings in “April of My Life.”
Ben calls the new album “a document of my two years away from the world. My healing.” He explains, “through real work in therapy over a long period, as well as spending many months isolated and alone, I have started to finally access my true self little by little, and it’s reflected in this music.”
Maybe that process would have happened anyway, without the world cataclysm, without the detour to the sacred mountains. But it happened in its peculiar way, and in a holy place, and so we have this poignant and beautiful two-album set, which couldn’t have been made in any other timeline or under any other conditions.
It’s an open question where exactly the timeline that begins with GUV III & IV leads. After tracking the albums in L.A. in early 2021, Ben decamped to Mexico — old Mexico — where the healing process has taken yet another surprising turn. “I’m taking a complete break from music,” Ben says. “I haven’t picked up a guitar since the record wrapped. I’m learning Spanish and boxing.”
Young Guv online
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