The Young Gods

Four decades ago, The Young Gods reconfigured rock music using the new technology of sampling in a manner no one else had thought to. In a rock and pop world dominated by Anglo-American orthodoxies, they proposed something huge and avant European in origin. Whereas others lazily recycled samples of old James Brown and Led Zeppelin riffs, in a spirit of enfeebled postmodernism, as if to suggest there was nothing new under the sun, The Young Gods created a new, elemental energy using the dead matter of the rock and classical music they sampled as fossil fuels - they rediscovered fire, a fire that raged through their first two albums. The formula was simple - drums, voice, samples - but what they wrought was revolutionary, post-postmodern. And now, Appear/Disappear, perhaps their most evolved album to date, which draws on all of their accumulated strengths and facets, from the quintessence of early Young Gods, to the ambient nuances of their mid-period, to the polyrhythms of In C. It is a deeply personal album for Treichler, lamenting the situation in Gaza, drone warfare but also celebrating the solidarity shown by citizens during the pandemic. It is also a reflection on mortality, affected by Treichler’s losing his wife while working on the album in 2023. In rock terms, The Young Gods are anything but ephemeral - their curiosity, their energy remains undimmed since they first emerged from Fribourg in a shock attack on dull norms in 1985. As Treichler says, “God’s not dead!”