Ten years ago, I couldn’t wait for the nights where I would go to clubs and get to move to songs that made me want to dance like no one was watching—but now that I can finally go into the club scene, everything seems so bland. I find a lot of this has to do with the kind of music that’s played lately, and the fact that it seems like no one makes fun music anymore, forcing DJ’s to play music from the 2000s and early 2010s rather than recent releases. That is, until Joey Valence and Brae came along.
Breaking into the scene in 2021, they have been pioneering the new “club” music sound, taking heavy inspiration from 90s and 2000s beats to sample and flip into their own music. Having started their duo in college, they’ve been cultivating a sort of DIY-dancey sound for the past five years. Their latest album, HYPERYOUTH, is a culmination of all the sounds they’ve experimented with thus far.
The album is inspired by 2010s-ish electronic music, artists such as Daft Punk and Charli xcx, but they continue to add their own flair and unique use of samples throughout. The 2010s influence is quite heavy as there’s a narration that flows, similar to that in Porter Robinson’s SMILE! 😀, as the album navigates the feelings and fears of growing up.
It’s tracks like “HYPEROUTH,” “IS THIS LOVE,” and “PARTY’S OVER” that really lean into this feeling of nostalgia and the idea of growing up from an adult’s perspective as they contrast heavily with the more fun, “club-sounding” songs with JPEGMAFIA and Rebecca Black. They feel like something that will get you up and jumping, especially as they switch from a sadder song (lyrically) to something more lively. As a listener, you get a little bit of whiplash from song to song, but that’s what living is all about: you can go out and have fun and still be hit with flashes of being afraid to grow up or reminders of a breakup—two themes that many of the songs seem to pull from.
The samples that they take from in this album speak to this as well. Two of the most prominent ones that I can think of are the sample of Skrillex’s “Bangarang” and a bit from the tv show Adventure Time, two pieces of media that, to me, are very 2010s-coded, and again heavily push that theme of nostalgia.
The songs that seem to have impacted me hardest happened to be “LIVE RIGHT,” “HAVE TO CRY,” “MYSELF,” and “DISCO TOMORROW.” They were the ones that revolved the most around these themes of growing up, which seems to be universal, yet hardly explored from the lens of a “party album.”
The idea of already being an adult yet still not knowing what you’re doing with your life is a very terrifying experience at times, and it’s something that we all go through, yet in how fast our day to day lives go about now, we rarely get time to really look at ourselves and the lives we live. It’s refreshing—as well as a little bit heartbreaking—to hear it be put into song.
I’ll admit there were multiple times where I found myself breaking down into tears while listening to this album (especially when I heard it for the first time), but those times were nothing like the end of this album, which put everything into perspective. In the first verse itself, I found myself choking up at the idea of someone achieving everything that they worked for, when at the beginning they didn’t even know if this was the direction that they wanted to go in their life. I imagine it’s a cathartic experience as an artist to finally have things working out the way you dreamed, and as a listener, there is a joy in being part of the reason why an artist is succeeding.
It was at the very very end of the album, practically the last minute, where there’s a sudden beat switch that feels like a final release of everything inside of you, letting all of the emotions, the pain, the fear be expelled. It’s an experience like no other—and one that I’m sure would be incredible live. This really feels like one of those albums where you have to hear it live to get the full experience of it, because earbuds are just not enough. I feel like I need to see JVB in front of my face to get the full HYPERYOUTH experience.
It is one of those albums that makes you want to get up and move and just dance around, and I think that’s what the music industry is missing today. Artists are scared of going back in time and finding what made those songs from 2010 so fun—whether that be the beats, lyrics, or electronic elements of the music—and bringing that back into our current decade. I’ve found that albums like this and a couple others that have come out recently—most namely Tyler the Creator and KAYTRANADA’s recent albums—have brought back almost a resurgence of fun music, and I hope that it’s here to stay.
