Youth Lagoon, is back with new single/video, “My Beautiful Girl.” “Songwriting just feels like receiving messages from a portal and transcribing them,” says Powers. “Some nights I’ll wake up at 3 AM and words feel like they’re bludgeoning my skull with a baseball bat. Most times, I don’t even know what they mean. I don’t think I’m supposed to. It’s only my job to listen, be constant, and write them down. And if I’m not a faithful steward of that job, those words will find someone else who is.” The track was recorded with co-producer and engineer/mixer Rodaidh McDonald and paired with a video directed by Regrets Only. “My Beautiful Girl” follows the single “Lucy Takes a Picture.”

From Trevor Powers AKA: Youth Lagoon:

“There’s a near-ghost town in western Idaho called Idaho City — about 30 minutes from home. I go there often to swim in the river, pray, and be alone in the country. Last time I went, I hiked through the cemetery (known as ‘Boothill’ ‘cuz of all the miners that died with their boots on) and saw a gravestone in darkness and dry weeds that said only, “My Beautiful Girl.” No name. No dates. Just love. Who was this beautiful girl? The portal opened, and I wrote down the message.”

In 2023, Powers released the acclaimed Heaven Is a Junkyard, an album of warped Americana that brought his focus back home. “I realized everything worth writing about is happening inside my house or right next door,” he says. “There’s an eternity of secrets in the American suburbs.” With Pitchfork awarding it “Best New Music” as well as landing in their top 50 albums of the year and The Guardian dubbing it a “masterpiece,” Youth Lagoon’s first album in 8 years pushed the project into a neo-western realm both deeply literary and musically vast, centered around an upright piano and static-coated electronics. “I killed off Youth Lagoon years ago because I lost who I was,” says Powers. “Then life jumped me in an alley and gave me a beating. That suffering changed my frequency. Now my ideas are a river. I can’t keep up.

The nature of life is in constant flux between beauty and brokenness,” says Powers. “It’s that internal war that drives me most. We may be broken, but we’re beautifully broken. The nearest I can get to depicting that is in music. Music just might be the last remaining road to Eden.”

order “My Beautiful Girl” HERE