Jenny Owen Youngs to Release New Album 'Avalanche'
The new album is set for release September 22 on Yep Roc Records, where she signed earlier this year.
By: Michael Major Jun. 27, 2023
Renowned singer-songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs announces her first full length studio album in over a decade, Avalanche, set for release September 22 on Yep Roc Records, where she signed earlier this year.
Avalanche is a momentous culmination for Youngs, who has chronicled a tumultuous, yet productive, ten years into an achingly beautiful collection of songs that dance along the emotional spectrum from heartbreak, divorce, grief, to finding love again and basking in joy.
Alongside the album announcement, Youngs has released the title track “Avalanche” with a stunning visualizer she curated of found archival footage of, fittingly, avalanches. Additionally, she released a live performance video of “Avalanche” featuring Jenny alongside Peter Silberman of The Antlers. Paste premiered the performance and single, praising it as a "thoughtful, introspective indie-folk track that centers Youngs' airy, grieving vocals atop a patient silky guitar and snare-heavy percussion."
“Avalanche,” co-written with Madi Diaz, the title track and first song on the record, is a perfect gateway into the grand emotional arc that Jenny Owen Youngs so deftly narrates and chronicles.
“An avalanche is an extreme force, it can cause great harm, and when it’s over, you can be certain things will be different than they were before,” says Youngs. “When it came time to name the album, this song leapt forward as the title track, because the unifying theme of this body of songs, to me, is the idea of moving from destruction to restoration, traveling through pain to possibility.”
At the time of writing the song and album, Youngs was reeling from a slew of recent life changes – divorce, falling in love again, relocating from Los Angeles where she lived for five years to a small town in coastal Maine and remarrying – and basking in the relief of being on the other side.
Avalanche as a body of work is filled with glimmers and glimpses of devastation and darkness giving way to light and love. “There’s a good deal of heartbreak and disappointment in this music,” Youngs explains, “but it ultimately gives way to excitement and promise, to the incredible, immeasurable bliss of falling in love and finding yourself again. These songs travel the whole emotional spectrum.”
Written with a series of friends including S. Carey, Madi Diaz, The Antlers’ Peter Silberman, Christian Lee Hutson, featuring drumming from The Walkmen’s Matt Barrick and recorded with producer Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, The Hold Steady, Cassandra Jenkins, Josh Ritter), the collection is an achingly beautiful exploration of loss, resilience, and growth from an artist who’s experienced more than her fair share of each in recent years.
The songs are deceptively serene here, layering Youngs’ infectious pop sensibilities atop lush, dreamy arrangements that often belie the swift emotional currents lurking underneath. The result is the most raw and arresting release of Youngs’ remarkable career, a brutally honest, deeply vulnerable work of self-reflection that learns to make peace with the past as it transforms doubt and grief into hope and transcendence.
That kind of range has been Youngs’ calling card from the very start. Born and raised in rural New Jersey, she fell in love with The Beatles at an early age before eventually finding her way to The Cranberries and Elliott Smith in high school. Her self-released debut, Batten The Hatches, landed a high-profile sync in the Showtime series Weeds and led to a deal with Nettwerk Records, which re-released the album along with her 2009 follow-up, Transmitter Failure.
Widespread acclaim and dates with the likes of Regina Spektor, Ingrid Michaelson, Frank Turner, and Aimee Mann followed, but by the time Youngs released her third album, 2012’s An Unwavering Band Of Light, she was ready for a change of pace, moving to LA to focus on writing for other artists and for film and TV.
In 2016, Youngs co-wrote Pitbull’s “Bad Man,” which debuted at the 58th annual Grammy Awards; in 2017, she co-wrote Shungudzo’s “Come On Back,” which was featured in the Fifty Shades Freed soundtrack; and in 2018, she co-wrote Panic! At The Disco’s smash hit “High Hopes,” which is now seven-times platinum and broke the record for most weeks atop Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart.
Along the way, Youngs also launched Buffering The Vampire Slayer, an episode-by-episode podcast devoted to Buffy The Vampire Slayer that attracted more than 160,000 monthly listeners and led to a book deal with St. Martin’s Press. Youngs recently launched a new series with her podcasting partner/ex-wife called The eX-Files and has a narrative fiction podcast due out next year, as well.
US TOUR DATES 2023
9/19 - 9/23 Americanafest Nashville, TN
10/12 - Baby’s All Right - Brooklyn, NY
10/13 - Miracle Theatre - Washington, D.C.
10/14 - Johnny Brenda's - Philadelphia, PA
10/19 - SPACE - Evanston, IL
11/15 - Moroccan Lounge - Los Angeles, CA
11/16 - Cafe Du Nord - San Francisco, CA
11/17 - Mississippi Studios - Portland, OR
11/18 - Fremont Abbey - Seattle, WA
3/1 - 3/ 8 Cayamo Cruise
Photo Credit: Lisa Czech
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