Hearts Like Ours

Young Blood hit different. I was scrolling through something, not really paying attention, and it started playing, and there’s this moment where the synth opens up and the drums come in and you just feel—stupid as it sounds—like everything’s possible right now. Like you’re invincible in the way you can only be when you’re young and haven’t learned to manage your expectations yet.

There’s this plague in modern indie where everything’s so self-aware that it eats itself. Pale boys in dark rooms apologizing for melodies. Swedish guys stacking synths on ennui. German bands that sound like they’re afraid someone will call them earnest. The Naked and Famous broke that rule. Alisa Xayalith and Thom Powers actually believe in what they’re singing, and you can hear it. That kind of sincerity is out of fashion, which is probably why it feels like a relief when it shows up.

Hearts Like Ours is the album where they made that feeling stick around. It doesn’t do irony or pretend to be clever. It opens something in you. Makes you feel less permanently stuck. The things you’ve been postponing feel possible again. You know those albums that play at the moment right before your life shifts, that you forever associate with that time? This is that album. The band and the moment get tangled up in memory.

I don’t know where youth goes after you’re done being young. But it’s good that there’s music that remembers how it felt, that doesn’t apologize for trying to move you. That’s getting rarer.