Singles Spotlight:
Young Lovers –
“Silver Lining Lost”

Hello reader,

Welcome back, or welcome if this is your first visit to SWT. Please look around the stay and stay awhile. The search bar is lovely.

Today, I’m happy to discuss another group making some great music: the LA-based post-rock/shoegaze band the Young Lovers. The group, consisting of guitarist Mikey Macapagal, drummer Eddie Ramos, bassist Josh Solomon, and vocalist Jonny Higa, got to know each other while attending and also organizing DIY shows in California’s San Fernando Valley.  The talented members of the group come from wonderfully diverse backgrounds of Filipino, Japanese, and Mexican-American, and “quickly earned a reputation as one of the city’s most beloved indie acts,” according to their bio in the press release for their sophomore album, The Circle’s End, which just came out on June 26th via Anxiety Blanket Records. I love the name of what is an artist-run indie label, as it evokes several connotations for me. How about you? Check out the vinyl for this album in the link above. Young Lovers released their self-titled debut album in 2020. One of several links to listen to that beautifully melancholy guitar-driven album is here via their Bandcamp page for the album.

The band’s bio leads off with a James Baldwin quote. And as a big fan of the civil rights activist and writer (among other talents and labels), when I saw Baldwin quoted, I knew I had to keep reading about this band. Consider me sold.

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” – James Baldwin

Back to the press release, which waxed poetic about Young Lovers, shedding some insights about the group, “The band’s journey up until this point can be seen as a prelude to these themes, and an establishing of their unique sonic vocabulary. 2018 single “Distance // Absence” as well as their 2020 self-titled LP saw the complete expression of their initial ideas surrounding love, informed by all the youthful romanticism of a newfound band. These records laid the foundation for the group’s signature harmonically rich, dynamically expansive, emotionally supercharged post-rock and shoegaze-derived vocabulary. It was this joyous and vulnerable sound as well as their willingness to connect with audiences that established them as one of the Los Angeles independent underground’s most stalwart and beloved bands.”

Bringing us to the near present day and the recent release of The Circle’s End, which the band worked on with producer David Jerkovich (Robert Lester Folsom, Ted Lucas). According to the album’s press release, the band had the following thoughts about it: “The Circle’s End is our portrait of grief, self-sabotage, and heartbreak, and the vicious cycles they trap us into. Young Lovers as a project exists as our collective outlet for thoughts and feelings we couldn’t process alone or through any other method, and so this album is us coming together to deal with our own struggles with these very issues. Referentially, this album pulls as much from post-rock and shoegaze as it does from our individual influences of classic pop, R & B, Alternative country, cool jazz, slowcore, and orchestral music, as those forms of music helped us survive and find meaning in difficult times in our lives. We sincerely hope this album can do the same for somebody else.” After listening, I hope it can do the same for you. And I know that Josh would agree without me having to ask him.

Very recently, I was fortunate enough to hear one of the singles, “Silver Lining Lost,” for this album, and I’m grateful that I did. It is an eight-minute song that is cathartic in its ebbs and flows melodically.  If you only like two to three-minute pop songs, why are you at SWT? We hope to expand your horizons. That’s all I’ll say about the song’s length, as it’s worth the listen regardless. Listening to this song allows you to be transported and engulfed within the song’s melody from the opening bass notes to its vocals and other instrumentation. It’s melancholy and slow-moving in the best ways. And its repetition is what I think most allows for my catharsis while listening. It doesn’t drone on in negative ways. This movement, to many listeners, will remind them of the shoegaze genre. And others post-rock. Let us know what you hear after you listen, as I don’t think that there’s an incorrect answer. I think this song is well worth the spotlight it gets today, as does the album and band. The song is a great introduction to the LA-based band Young Lovers.

But before we do that, the Young Lovers shared an exclusive quote just for the SWT audience. Thank you for that!  “If ‘Back Again’ is our depiction of a car crash, ‘Silver Lining Lost’ is the unusual, disturbing calm that comes after one. We wanted to recreate the feeling of being shocked, emotionally lost, and unmoored, searching for answers where there aren’t any, and yearning for a past before tragedy. In a lot of ways, it sets the tone for the band moving forward, being a near-total stylistic, thematic, and emotional departure from our first album, and sets in motion everything to come.”  I can see what you’ve said there, and I think listeners of the song and album will understand what you mean after they listen to the album The Circle’s End for themselves.

Check out the song, “Silver Lining Lost” by pressing play:

Take a peek at the cover art for The Circle’s End:

The track list for The Circle’s End:

1. Prelude
2. Back Again
3. Silver Lining Lost
4. Ross
5. Mourning Routine
6. Longest Drive
7. A Year Or Two
8. The Circle’s End
9. Continue?

Alex M Theel

Co-Founder, Reviewer, Content Creator, Business side, Editor at Scummy Water Tower Productions | Web

Scummy Water Tower Productions co-founder, reviewer, business manager, and editor. Thank you for visiting this site, scummywatertower.com, and YouTube for Water Tower Sessions and SWT Interviews. And all of our socials.
Questions, feedback, or more? Contact me: alex@scummywatertower.com