GUV, the project of multi-artist Ben Cook, recently announced the release of his new album, Warmer Than Gold,, which will drop on January 30th via Run For Cover Records. Ahead of the album’s arrival, GUV has released the album’s latest single and title track. “Warmer Than Gold” follows lead single “Let Your Hands Go.” GUV has also announced a run of North American tour dates, including shows with Spiritual Cramp and Imploders in the Winter and more, starting June 29th in Los Angeles.

Warmer Than Gold, includes contributions from James Matthew Seven, Darcy Baylis, Hatchie, Meg Mills of Turnstile, and many more. It’s a record that is described as one that “blends elements of Britpop, baggy, classic indie pop.” The result is an album that feels in conversation with the entirety of his musical journey—a set of songs whose roots go all the way back to his childhood growing up in between Toronto and England, and travel through his prolific years as Young Guv (“I’m not so young anymore, three letter band names are cool, and I’m tired of being mistaken as a rapper,” he says of the name adjustment).

GUV
Warmer Than Gold
track list
Run For Cover Records

1. Let Your Hands Go
2. Blue Jade
3. Warmer Than Gold
4. Thorns In My Heart
5. Out of This Place
6. Chasin Luv
7. Seaside Story
8. Oscillating
9. Hello Miss Blue
10. Never Should Have Said
11. Crash Down Feeling
12. September Grey

GUV 2026 Live Dates

01/29 Los Angeles, CA @ Three of Clubs
01/31 Boston, MA @ Something In The Way Fest
02/12 San Diego, CA @ Soda Bar
02/13 Santa Ana, CA @ Constellation Room
02/15 Oakland, CA @ Stork Club
02/18 Reno, CA @ Holland Project
02/19 Portland, OR @ Polaris Hall
02/20 Seattle, WA @ Black Lodge
02/21 Vancouver, BC @ The Cobalt
02/26 New York, NY @ Elsewhere Zone One
02/27 Philadelphia, PA @ Nikki Lopez
02/28 Baltimore, MD @ Metro Gallery
03/05 Montreal, QC @ Foufs *
03/06 Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Palace *
03/07 Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop *
03/08 Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall *

* w/ Spiritual Cramp, Imploders

More on GUV:

Warmer Than Gold, the new album from Ben Cook’s project GUV, is a document of a life in music, a critical and celebratory travelogue, an attempt to transcend the homogeneous and status-obsessed conditions of the contemporary world through the use of big beats, big choruses, and distortion. It’s a record made on the go that makes sense anywhere. And most of all, with its expanded sonic palette and emphasis on breakbeats, it ushers in the newest era of an artist who has never stopped growing.
Cook, who grew up moving between Toronto and England, boasts anglo bonafides that separate him from the growing pack of hardcore kids sporting windbreakers and bowl cuts. “My grandmother helped invent the miniskirt in London in the 60’s, my parents met in a squat in Brixton. My dad was the drug dealer, my mom the hippie runaway,” Cook explains. “Growing up, I had a little bit of a Bristol life, it was more like trip-hop and reggae vibes over there when I was young.” Two of the first shows he attended, at the age of 12, were Oasis and Neil Young. After the show, he remembers thinking, “Yeah, I’m gonna do music forever.” Not long after he discovered hardcore and punk, and it was off to the races, first with his beloved hardcore band, No Warning (who he continues to play with to this day), then as a member of punk experimentalists, Fucked Up, from 2007 to 2021–and all the while building a deep and impressive catalog of solo work first as Young Governor, then Young Guv, and now simply, GUV (“I’m not so young anymore, three letter band names are cool, and I’m tired of being mistaken for a rapper,” Cook notes).

Warmer Than Gold is the widescreen culmination of all of these threads. The album’s music retains the hooky spirit of Cook’s previous records, like the acclaimed double albums GUVI & II and GUV III & IV, but it adds a decidedly rhythmic element informed by classic Madchester and Britpop. It smears and soars, it feels like bolting down the M1 Motorway at midnight, propelled by an urgency unseen in Cook’s other work. What is retained from those earlier power pop releases, though, is the artist’s sharp ear for hooks; now combined with a recharged production sensibility inspired by everyone from the Beastie Boys to The Field Mice to Primal Scream, Cook is able to musically support the core lyrical themes that run throughout the project: the global flattening of culture, the passage of time in the material world, and the artist’s role within all of it.

Cook deploys his musical language as a vehicle to talk about the cultural erosion of the cities he has been moving through for decades. “Warmer Than Gold is about slipping through two worlds. One ruled by luxury and the worship of status, and another that feels like an escape, a dream you can almost touch,” Cook explains. “It’s about buses, trains, planes, about big dreams in solitude, finding something real despite everything trying to erase it. It’s about London, my family, everyone I’ve ever and never met. It’s the feeling of infinite movement, the glow of yellow moons over dark oceans, the weight of history pressing against the future.”

It all makes for an album that’s critical of the systems Cook observes but triumphant in its musical sweep. At under 45 minutes, Warmer Than Gold’s running time is less sprawling than some of GUV’s previous collections of music, but it compacts a lot of energy into a tight container. Defined by a feeling of unstoppable motion, the songs hit like time-elapsed shots of a busy urban intersection at night. The record was made between multiple locations in multiple continents, and when Cook isn’t on the road with any of his projects, he stays on the road as a tour manager. “The music world is unstable, but I find comfort in the bubble it creates,” Cook says. At its core, Warmer Than Gold is also a musical conversation between two old friends. The story starts last year in Portugal. That’s where Cook, who had taken a few years off from making music, met up with his friend and collaborator in No Warning, James Matthew Seven, to try out something new. Those sessions yielded more play than work, but they did seed a body of music that would begin to come together when the two were geographically distant from each other.

“He is someone that just really sits at home all day and lives in his own world and makes music,” Cook says, of Seven, who makes music under the name JMVII. “”He clocked I was in London. I’m out in the streets, taking it all in, riding the bus, posted in the pub, soaking up the city and what it has to offer. I’d walk around and think of my family and what their lives must have been like,” Cook says. It was this knowledge of Cook’s movement through London that inspired Seven to start cooking up a series of breakbeat-driven tracks that drew from the uptempo frenzy of turn-of-the-90s British rave and rock music. “He was like, Here’s a soundtrack to what you just did yesterday,” Cook says.

Armed with some banging instrumentals and a lot of free time to move through London, Cook began sculpting the lyrics and melodies that would begin to flesh out Warmer Than Gold. Everything came together fast. The second half of the record was made in Los Angeles where Cook and Seven built on the spontaneity of the music they’d made in London. Though Cook often works in a painstakingly precise way, Warmer Than Gold was made with a one-take spirit. “Usually I demo things very particularly,” Cook says. “And that’s not the case with this one, everything was cooked on the spot with the team I’ve worked so closely with for so long. There was a lot more trust and flow in the process of making this album.” By the time the album was completed, Cook and JMVII had assembled an all-star cast of creatives including recording/production from the likes of Tony Price, Noah Kohll, Max Epstein (aka Photographic Memory), Darcy Baylis, Jimmy Dixon, Johnny Bell, Joey Oaxaca, Walter Sedriks, and Remghost; as well as performance contributions from Hatchie, Meg Mills of Turnstile, and many more.

Pre-order Warmer Than Gold by Guv HERE