Young Guv drops his new album GUV IV, on June 24, 2022 via Hand Drawn Dracula/Run For Cover Records. Today Young Guv has shared another early taste of GUV IV, with “Nowhere At All.” The track follows lead single “Change Your Mind.” Young Guv AKA: Ben Cook is also vocalist for No Warning and former guitarist of Fucked Up.

Cook discussed the new song, saying:

“This was the very last song written for these records in Los Angeles. Another nice co-write with James Matthew VII and Tommy Major on the lead guitar. I feel I’ve always hinted at new wave and sophistapop with the Guv project, and it’s definitely something I will be exploring much more on my next albums. Lyrics were taken from a little notebook I kept on me while in Taos – I actually had written this originally as this Tom Petty folk joint and they then were tried on a side project song for a jokey psych rock band we were calling Taosman 5 – but eventually found their home on this track. I think it’s my favorite single.”

Young Guv
GUV IV
track list
Hand Drawn Dracula

1. Too Far Gone
2. Change Your Mind
3. Sign From God
4. Overcome
5. Love Me Don’t Leave Me
6. Cry 2 Sleep
7. Cold In The Summer
8. Maybe I Should Luv Somebody Else
9. Helium
10. Nervous Around U
11. Nowhere At All
12. Wind In My Blood

In the spring of 2020, Ben Cook, a.k.a. Young Guv, Young Governor, or just Guv, found himself holed up in the New Mexico high desert, his band’s U.S. tour having been abruptly cancelled by Covid during its Southwestern leg. Suddenly he and his bandmates were living moment to moment in something called an Earthship — a solar-rigged adobe structure sustainably constructed with recycled bottles and tires — and out there in the serene vastness, a short “ride it out” stint turned into a nine month sojourn that resulted in two albums worth of Young Guv’s most compelling and hook-filled songs yet: GUV III and GUV IV.

“I’d never been to New Mexico,” Cook explains, “I’m a Canadian from a city, I was living in New York City, we were in the middle of a tour, and then all us are suddenly in this totally new environment. We were sharing money, sharing a place to live, really banding together even more so than when you’re on tour. That’s already an insular situation but this was something else.” The group’s daily life was ad hoc, communal, idyllic, almost Utopian. “It was beautiful,” Cook 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.” But the work was different and much more daunting. Though the marooned sextet had built themselves a makeshift studio for their new home, inspiration was slow and sporadic. “I was isolated, the world was in complete chaos,” Cook 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.”

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