Transitions have always been a stock in trade for Young the Giant — within songs, between albums and even in shifting identities a half-dozen years ago from the band’s previous incarnation as The Jakes. While that was potentially their biggest and most contentious transition, it was probably the easiest of all for the Irvine, Calif. Indie Rock quintet.
“By the time we changed the name, there were only two original members of The Jakes,” drummer Francois Comtois says during tour rehearsals in Nashville, Tenn. “I was one of the newer members so it felt like I was playing in someone else’s band. I think we all felt like that. Sonically, we wanted something that was a little less genre-specific.
“Not that The Jakes was, but I personally felt like it had a Dance Rock, super-fun Indie Pop type thing. There’s definitely still a lot of that, but we all wanted something that would allow us to explore different genres and moods. The name didn’t feel like it would fit anymore, and it was hard to have a sense of ownership when it wasn’t anything we all had chosen. So when we were ready to start working on that first record, we realized if we were going to change the name, we were going to have to do it now. And we did.”
The band’s need for exploration and invention was well served by the name change. The sinewy, Police-tinged Indie Rock of its eponymous 2010 debut — cited by Amazon as the best Rock album of that year — gave way to the Math Rock precision and powerful polyrhythms of 2014’s Mind Over Matter, which led to Young the Giant’s latest triumph of sonic diversity, the danceable solution of the just-released Home of the Strange.
“As the drummer, I think one of my responsibilities is to help the songs find a rhythmic identity, and how someone is going to move to the song,” Comtois says. “For Mind Over Matter, I was in a place where I wanted to explore more weird time stuff, slightly more Math Rock. I didn’t really acknowledge it at the time, but I just wanted to keep it interesting for me. This time around, I really just wanted it to be, ‘How are people going to move to it? How am I going to move to it?’”
As it often happens, the ultimate direction that Young the Giant took with Home of the Strange was determined by the arrival of one decidedly different song in the writing process. Once the band conceived “Amerika,” which became the album’s opener and the first track leaked to announce its release, its course going forward was clear.
Comtois says it “opened the floodgates.”
“It was written in a way that we hadn’t written before and was touching on themes we hadn’t really explored but that we’d certainly been aware of,” he says. “Once we realized that it worked and that we felt comfortable in our ability to do that, we tried to follow that thread for the other songs.”
The band’s new sonic architecture — moving from more complex rhythms to something more straightforward and danceable —forced them to consider new methods of execution in the studio. That played out for the remainder of the writing sessions and into the arranging and recording of the new songs.
“We did half the writing by ourselves in a studio in downtown L.A. that had a bunch of old organs and really great old drum machines, and nice guitars and drums, pretty standard stuff,” Comtois says. “We had that sound going. Then we got into the studio with the guy who ended up being the producer, Alex Salibian, and his studio is set up a little more as an Electronic music studio, so we found a middle ground between the rootsy, organic sound and something a little more biting and contemporary.”
While Young the Giant exhibits its share of sonic reference points on Home of the Strange, Comtois notes that the band members tend to draw a lot of inspiration from their expanding experiences and maturity as a band.
“I think the overarching thing for us is that it has to be based on our experiences,” Comtois says of what went into the new album. “In the past, a lot of that was coming to terms with what it is to be young or in love or those things that, as a young person, you struggle with.
“I’m the eldest, I’m 28, but we’re all pushing mid-20s, getting closer to 30 and seeing the world around us, in particular touring around America over the past five years and seeing all the facets of this culture. It’s kind of an appreciation of how bizarre it can be, not necessarily in a bad or good way, there’s just a lot about it which is strange, and we thought that was a great and endless source of inspiration.
“It’s beautiful,” he continues. “It really is very touching to see how different cultures can come together and form something entirely new, but still be reminiscent of where they come from. Hopefully, we can continue to focus in on that.”
Given the rhythmic differences between Young The Giant’s sound on Home of the Strange and the previous two albums, it seems natural to wonder if the band plans to apply the new sonic aesthetic to its older material in concert.
“That’s a great question and it’s actually one that we’re asking ourselves right now,” Comtois says. “We’re going through a lot of the songs we haven’t played in a while and thinking about if they fit in their current form or if there’s a way we can make them fit better.
“In certain cases, we’re not going to mess with it, but others will lend themselves to rearranging and just a fresh perspective, because that’s also cool,” he continues. “For us it’s about striking a balance where everyone feels like they’re getting what they came for, and it’s still interesting and fun and fresh for us. It’s definitely a little bit of a tightrope act.”
YOUNG THE GIANT performs Saturday at Madison Theater with Ra Ra Riot. Tickets/more info: madisontheateronline.com.
This article appears in Sep 21-28, 2016.
