• News

• All

Jun 17, 2024 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Julia Mayorova

Nashville-based indie singer/songwriter Conner Youngblood arrived with a captivating style of impressionistic bedroom folk on his 2018 debut album, Cheyenne. He has been quiet in the years since before returning last year with a new single, “All They Want Is Violence.” That track proved to be the first taste of Youngblood’s forthcoming LP, Cascades, Cascading, Cascadingly, due out on September 6th.

Youngblood’s latest record touches on an array of inspirations, including dream pop, experimentalist folk, and ambient music, fusing it all in a swirl of analog and organic instrumentation. The record is the result of a singular creative vision, with Youngblood playing all the instruments himself, producing, and engineering the album. He returned last month with another new single, “Blue Gatorade,” and today Youngblood is back with his latest track, “Reveille!,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Reveille!” opens in a dreamy ambient wash of instrumentation before settling into a driving rock rhythm, accompanied by Youngblood’s voice drenched in watery vocoder effects. The lyrics to “Reveille!” are taken from a poem by the same name by A.E. Housman. Youngblood delivers them above a rush of gauzy melodies, incorporating samples of Finnish joiking—a traditional Scandinavian style of folk song. The resulting track feels emblematic of Youngblood’s ambitious style. He pulls from a seemingly unending array of cultural touchpoints but weaves the disparate elements together in a way that feels seamless and resonant.

“‘Reveille!’ (wake up! in French) is a poem by A.E. Housman that just so happened to cross my path while I running out of my own lyrical ideas. Musically, the song had already began to take shape as a pretty standard driving rock beat, but once I gave in to the idea of giving up control of the lyrics to someone else’s words (and eventually adding my own chorus), it actually felt really freeing to then try out some new things. I ended up adding a sample of a Finnish joik, ”freestyling” the entire melody while playing a vocoder in one take, and just allowing the song to go wherever it wanted to, versus what I had planned.”

Check out the song below. Cascades, Cascading, Cascadingly is out September 6th via Missing Piece Records.