Recommendations of the Editorial team
The problematization of male behavior in exceptional emotional situations has long since become a topic of its own in the public debate. The concept of toxic masculinity is often vague. Musicians have already taken up the topic, sometimes with anger in their stomachs, but more often with some irony. This is certainly not new. Just think of Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” – the musical emotional neglect of a boy that ends in tragedy.
The Haunted Youth from Belgium, initially a solo project of their singer Joachim Liebens, but now a quintet that performs with a lot of energy on stage, have chosen for their second album a bedroom noise rock exploration tour through the brain of a boy whose heart has been broken. The title, “Boys Cry Too,” carefully opens the coordinate system towards The Cure. But teenage fear is also accompanied by self-harm, desires for revenge and death, as well as a whole cornucopia of feelings that are difficult to grasp in their contradictions, but do not necessarily lead to a catastrophe.
The opening with “In My Head” is a double-edged sword. The piece begins with sadly plodding electronic footprints like those from the soundtrack to the great horror film “It Follows”. They carefully transition into the dream pop mix that made up the band’s debut album (“Dawn Of The Freak”, 2022) and which is now obviously passé. “I don’t need/For you to be this way/Love me/Just like you always say,” it says, before the actual (desperate) message to the lost lover appears: “Don’t leave/I’ll do anything…” After a little more than seven minutes, Liebens screams like a dog tormented by mental anguish who wants to burn something out of his thoughts.
There is no melody that isn’t about to break, plus dreamy synth sounds, hard guitars and even harder emotions. Your singer calls the seething mixture an “80s coming-of-age punk rock film.” My Bloody Valentine can be heard (especially in “Castlevania”, whose title is reminiscent of a vampire video game series from the late eighties), goth-grunge blends, even some New Order (“I Hear Voices”). After four songs you’re already completely exhausted, probably like the protagonist to whom the songs are dedicated.
This record grabs you by the collar
The highlight of the nihilistic rush is the “Emo Song”. Maybe a confession of the genre, or even the greatest possible opening to emotional exhaustion without meaning. But: The way The Haunted Youth drive themselves into a guitar maelstrom is something we haven’t heard in a long time. Here too, self-distortion beckons: “I guess I’m just older now/I guess I got tired somehow/Guess I’m over everything/And everyone by now.” In his sparse texts, Liebens works with drastic, simply captured emotional states. Perhaps needless to say, an earlier song has the choking title “I Feel Like Shit And I Wanna Die.” As a Thirty-Forty-Whatever-Something you may smile wearily at such things, but for a teenager they are an indomitable reality.
What The Haunted Youth manages to do over the course of eleven powerful and exhausting songs is to stage the waking up after a love breakdown as a dark punk-pop musical. The naked plight of the struggling teenager is deliberately designed as a male perspective. Liebens: “The first half of the album basically shows how everyone sees a boy when he’s heartbroken: he builds up walls, is paranoid, angry and aggressive. But then the second half is a completely different story – she’s vulnerable.”
In this approach, the musicians go beyond those who fundamentally see male aggression and violent desperation as a social problem. If stories, whether literary, filmic or musical, are often about the silent breeder who becomes a violent criminal, this music tries to bring the raw, screaming refugee from life back to bed by confronting his own vulnerability. In “Falling To Pieces”, which is designed as an instrumental epic, there are no more words needed for the healing collapse (except for this one: “Don’t kill yourself I love you”). A piano briefly appears between the loud walls of guitars, as if it were the eye of a hurricane. That’s, yeah, pretty emo.
“Boys Cry Too” ultimately feels like the reconciliatory hug after a senseless fight – or like the defiant burning of a photo of the being that opened your heart for a moment, only to rip it out. To be continued, definitely.
