Youth Lagoon

In the fall of 2023, Powers discovered a shoebox filled with home videos in his parents’ basement. “When I took the tapes home and popped in the first one, it was my brother Bobby and I at the state fair. I was 4 years old choking on a corn dog,” he laughs. The vivid intimacies of life and boyhood depicted in Powers’ home movies began shaping and infusing with his songs. He started sampling the audio and manipulating it into a kind of musical cinematography. “I wanted to really make someone feel like they were inside my living room in 1993, but rearrange the furniture a bit,” says Powers. “Something about combining that level of hyperreality with fairytales of devils and detectives weirdly felt like the truest way to immortalize these pieces of my family.”

Rooted in love and childhood memoir, “Rarely Do I Dream” is a triumph of American gothic imagination — where storybook innocence dissolves into a radioactive billow of teenage drifters, drug-addled hustlers, and old-world folklore.

Powers’ ability to relentlessly push and evolve the project forward has taken Youth Lagoon into a neo-western realm both fiercely original and strikingly expansive. “Rarely Do I Dream” marks a seismic transformation and an instant, indelible landmark in Powers' revered discography. With a profound love and dedication to family, along with his own brand of genre-bending noir rock, Powers’ has achieved what he set out to do.

“I wanted to make an album that feels like life itself . . . ”