Three Years On, Gang Of Youths’ ‘Go Farther In Lightness’ Feels More Vital Than Ever

In late January last year, Dave Le’aupepe rocked back and forth on his heels on the edge of the stage at the Enmore Theatre, the swelling and coursing crescendo of ‘Fear And Trembling’ threatening to crash over him.

He’s slamming his fist into his chest, punctuating the lyrics with each hit: “I feel everything…I feel it all…I feel it in my bones and in my fucking skull.” The audience copies him, and the atmosphere is heady, as eyes spotted with tears train on Le’aupepe with complete and utter devotion. This isn’t a rock show, you think, this is a church service. Then again, this is just what a Gang of Youths show is.

The Say Yes To Life tour was a victory lap for the Sydney band, whose second album Go Farther In Lightness had earned them a string of heady accolades including an ARIA #1 and multiple awards, including the pointy gongs for Album Of The Year and Best Rock Album. The tour was mammoth — they played multiple sold out shows back-to-back at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre and Melbourne’s Forum Theatre, before finishing it up with a headline slot at Laneway.

It seemed as if every day they were adding shows, the tickets couldn’t be sold fast enough. The band could have gone big — Go Farther In Lightness was primed for arenas and amphitheatres, but the band chose to honour their fans by giving them an experience to remember.

“Who the fuck wants to see a band like us in a big arena when you can see it in a small one?” Le’aupepe told me in a wide-ranging profile last year. “It feels like a really fucking ingratiating and self aggrandising thing, to go straight to a big arena with your second album. We wanted to give the people who had been seeing us since the beginning one last little go at something tangible and intimate.”

In the sweaty crowd of the Enmore, it does like that. “Everyone at the Enmore is all in,” Kate Hennessy wrote in The Guardian of an earlier show on the tour. “We’ve got women in their 50s, kids with their parents, couples on date night and lots of men with gym-thick torsos singing, swaying, dancing, crying and hugging it out in a show that oozes into one of the most uninhibited outpourings of joy and emotion I’ve attended in recent times.”

Eighteen months on from those shows, and three years on from Go Farther In Lightness’ release, those outpourings feel more precious than ever.

Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane

Gang of Youths’ debut, 2015’s The Positions, was a dark and wrenching journey — detailing Le’aupepe’s marriage breakdown and his ex-wife’s struggle with terminal illness, as well as struggles with addiction and a suicide attempt, chronicled on the heart bursting ‘Magnolia’.

Go Farther In Lightness was The Positions’ anthemic and life-affirming end, an album that grasped at the sublime and amazing experience of being human, flaws very much included.

“I’m not a fucking neurotic drunken drug addict anymore. I’m embracing love and life,” Le’aupepe told Pilerats around the time of the album’s release.

The tracklist, dotted by titles like ‘Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane’, ‘Say Yes To Life’, ‘Persevere’, and ‘The Heart Is A Muscle’, garnered many cynical responses — Stereogum posed the question of whether the band were simply too earnest.

“It makes for a remarkable odyssey of an album that’ll engulf you, leaving a bewildered smile on your face.”

“Sometimes I worry that this shit sounds too twee or cliché,” Le’aupepe told the magazine. “We always cringe, but in reality, anybody would fucking do that. All I do is apply that to my music. If it seems kinda cringe-y and cliché but something that most people, including me, would probably say, it might be OK.”

And sure, the Springsteen stadium level of earnestness might make some cringe — but for most, Go Farther In Lightness simply tapped into something that people desperately needed: hope.

It would be impossible to listen to ‘What Can I Do When The Fire Goes Out’ and not be gripped by its heady rush, its swirling and crashing guitars. Or by the gentle and considered title track, the muted piano a soft bed for Le’aupepe’s falling vocals — or by the colossal swell of ‘The Deepest Sighs, The Frankest Shadows’, the kick drum pushing forward into the explosive chorus.

“It makes for a remarkable odyssey of an album that’ll engulf you, leaving a bewildered smile on your face, a tear in your eye and a heart that’s full,” Jaymz Clements wrote in Rolling Stone. “[It] poetically explores the human experience in all its bleakness and triumph, confusion and clarity, heartbreak and joyousness.”

Persevere In 2020

Go Farther In Lightness is three years old this month, and yet its themes of hope and love and tenacity feel ever present — perhaps they’re even more relevant now, given the horror and dislocation we’ve experienced in 2020.

“You can stay afraid, or slit the throat of fear and be brave/And scratch the little itch ’til you’re moving like a motherfucker,” Le’aupepe sings on ‘Let Me Down Easy’. “Don’t stop, don’t stop believing/In truth and grace in the grievance.”

“Do not let this thing you got go to waste,” he urges on ‘Do Not Let…’. “Do not let your heart be dismayed/It’s here by some random disclosure of grace/From some vascular, great thing/Let your life grow strong and sweet to the taste.”

“I believe in the emancipatory potential of rock and roll.”

A new album from the band is on its way — they’ve previously said it’ll “definitely” be out in 2020, but given the chaos of the year a delay wouldn’t be surprising. They tentatively have tour dates locked in for next year, which certainly suggests they’re ready to head back out with new music. But for now, clutching the songs of Go Father In Lightness will still soothe hearts.

“I believe in the emancipatory potential of rock and roll,” Le’aupepe told me in 2019. “It has an unbelievable freeing power and staying power in the world. That’s why I’m glad it’s gone out of the mainstream and gone underground again, because it has time to gestate and become new and inclusive. I think what me and Joji always wanted to do growing up…we wanted to make music that we wish we had back then.

“And I think there’s something really powerful about this aspirational type of music. I think it’s really important, now more than ever, I think in this day we need music that’s empowering for people, that isn’t about catering to the fancies of culture. It’s about uniting people from all walks of life. And that’s really important, that kind of shit can actually change the world, and change people’s lives.”

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Jules LeFevre is the editor of Music Junkee. She is on Twitter.

Photo Credit: Belinda Dipalo/Music Junkee