Youth Lagoon - Heaven Is A Junkyard

After a strong run between 2010 and 2016, Idaho-bred musician Trevor Powers temporarily ceased making music as Youth Lagoon, the nostalgic and psychedelically tinged bedroom pop project with which he'd created three critically acclaimed albums. Heaven Is a Junkyard marks Powers' return to the Youth Lagoon moniker, continuing the clearer production he left off with on 2015's Savage Hills Ballroom, and leaning into gentler, almost Americana-styled instrumentals that seem to take root in grounded emotional states. Throughout the album, soft piano intermingles with found sounds, samples, laid-back drum grooves, and occasional unobtrusive electronic elements as Powers spins opaque lyrics about troubled families, open skies, and images that evoke the feeling of life in the heartland. This formula becomes its own kind of flyover pop on the album's best songs, with "Idaho Alien" and "Prizefighter" coming one after another and feeling like continuations of each other's affable hooks and softly