Interview by Kris Peters
Brisbane outfit Young Lions are on the cusp of dropping their fourth album, the wonderfully titled Make A Rainbow And Put It In The Sky, which is out on January 6.
An extremely challenging album for the band in many respects, it is also an album that signifies the continued musical growth of the band who are coming off the back of the universally praised previous release Mr. Spaceman in 2015.
It has been a long while between releases for the band, with Zach Britt sitting down with HEAVY to run us through the new album.
"It has been such a journey," he affirmed. "I'm so excited. This one is really cathartic to get out. Every album, I'm sure you would understand, has such a distinct journey in itself but this one for us has been quite arduous. Coming through what was 2020 to 2022 for music, entertainment, and the whole world with super big changes for all of us... we wrote this album from 2018... the whole thing has been crazy. Where it was getting mixed got flooded, there was just all these insane things that happened on the way. That's kind of where the album title came from. There's just been this huge, big effort to put something out that will give people a smile at the end of the day."
Musically, Make A Rainbow And Put It In The Sky distances itself somewhat from it's predecessor, with Britt saying it was important Young Lions created a new body of work rather than rehash a winning formula.
"Everything started from a personal point of view," he measured. "A lot of the time with albums before this it would start with the ex guitarist Dan coming to us with all of the beds, but I write everything from scratch as a song standing alone and then took those songs to the band which was something we hadn't done before. We really relished the process that way. I think we got more dynamic than ever before. It might not necessarily be the heavy offering that people got on our first album Burn or the soft element we had on Blue Isla, but it's got a crazy journey. I think it's a little more exploratory than anything we have done before, even coming out of Mr. Spaceman, but there's some heavy hooks in there and some real ragers. I think people who know what we are usually about are going to be able to get a kick out of this one too."
In the full interview Zach talks more about the musical side of the album, living up to expectation, resisting the temptation of recycling tried and true material, the musical journey of Young Lions so far, this years 10th anniversary of the band and what they have planned, future shows and more.