Isolated Youth (Sweden) – Love locked in a dark room (single/future album track)

Well you can’t say there’s nothing here that is evocative. Isolated Youth. Semi detached hoodies living in a parallel universe on a council estate to which the worst tenants are shipped, hanging around on foggy street corners at midnight. What was that glint of light I saw then? A knife?

And ‘Love locked in a dark room’. It sounds like something you might experience somewhere down a dimly lit corridor at Berghain.

And then, it’s from their forthcoming debut album, ‘Miserere mei’ (‘Have mercy on me’) which was one of Allegri’s many settings of the same text (Psalm 51) written for the Vatican over 120 years and so powerful that a Pope decreed it could be played only during the week leading to Easter — and then only in the Sistine Chapel.

It is very easy to form a mindset before you’ve even heard a note with band names, song titles and historical context like that. It’s going to be erudite and punkish heavy rock, possibly metal, made by sociology students that dropped out.

But then I remembered that they’ve been here before, in April of last year, when they released their first song for four years, ‘Psykosoma’ and I drew much the same conclusions before I listened to it and heard what is an original, possibly unique, coming together of punk, goth, blues and psych.

And ‘Love locked in a dark room’ is something different again. The underlying riff is similar to Iggy Pop’s ‘The Passenger’ and with perhaps even a passing reference to The Beatles in their heavier and more experimental moments in the opening bars but it is multiplied and amplified over and over again both musically and vocally into the mother of all rock anthems.

Played live, I don’t think I’d care to be locked in too small a room with it for fear of having my head blown off.

And here’s a thing. They co-opted Faris Badwan of The Horrors to co-produce ‘Love locked in a dark room’, it having been the first song he heard during a live stream and which immediately drew him to the band.

You can hear the influence and he additionally acted, they say, as a mentor and a “weird gothic uncle” to them.

They must have known it was going to find its way to the desk of a weird Gothic reviewer.

‘Miserere mei’ is now out on April 4^th.

Our many Japanese readers will be delighted to learn of a special early release there on January 21st at BIJ Records. They’re turning Japanese, I really think so.

Find them on:

Website: https://www.isolatedyouth.com/