DISCOGRAPHY DEEP DIVE: Young Widows
Celebrating their triumphant return in 2025
It’s a great pleasure to use a 2025 pic of Young Widows to kick off this Discography Deep Dive - though the Louisville, Kentucky trio has never really broken up (and actually played a few kickass shows in the meantime), it’s been a long time since their last album ‘Easy Pain’, and it wasn’t entirely obvious during this period if there would ever be another one. So one of the really cool musical news of this year so far has been the announcement of ‘Power Sucker’, their fifth album overall and first in eleven long years. The world was a different place when we last had a Young Widows album to chew on, no matter how old that makes us feel, and the new album is indeed also a different beast, but it’s still very much Young Widows, and there’s something immensely reassuring about that. The grit, the rumble, the dirty electricity of the guitar sound, the strangely rough, poetic nature of the lyrics, everything we want of this band, and of noise rock in general, is still in there, even more so. The most recent video is for one of the absolute highlight songs on the new album, so it’s the perfect way to quickly check out how cool it is to have these guys back:
So yeah, let’s celebrate this very welcome return by looking at both the present and the past too, with a dive through their four past albums that comes up for air at exactly the right moment, with ‘Power Sucker’ waiting at the surface. Enjoy!
SETTLE DOWN CITY
(2006, Jade Tree)
Young Widows came into being kinda by accident, as the band was formed after Breather Resist vocalist Steve Sindoni left in December 2005. This left the remaining three members, guitarist Evan Patterson, bassist Nick Thieneman and drummer Geoff Paton, with the task of writing the follow-up to their (excellent, it has to be said) debut ‘Charmer’. That’s what ‘Settle Down City’ was initially supposed to be, but luckily, during the process, the (now) power trio realised the music they were doing now was so different from before that they had to become a whole new band. A wise move, especially when actually comparing the two - it’s not just a name thing, this really is the work of a different band. Much less frenetic than the busier, chaotic sound of Breather Resist, with Evan’s less shouty and more cynical kind of vocal approach giving it a totally different vibe, ‘Settle Down City’ placed the newly-formed Young Widows firmly in the noise rock ballpark. The sound is plesantly raw and dry, with the guitar tone in particular dragging your face across the pavement dirty block after dirty block all while the grumble of the rhythm section evokes all the best bruisers you can name, from Cop Shoot Cop to The Jesus Lizard to Melvins, even. Even at such an early, transitory stage, this was already a pretty individual take on the genre for the trio, bringing in elements of (post-)punk and even grunge to establish a totally unique personality that they would build on for the rest of their ongoing career.
OLD WOUNDS
(2008, Temporary Residence)
And what a build-up! Despite the consistency and permanent evolution the band has displayed throughout their discography, ‘Old Wounds’ is arguably still their landmark record. It’s not a wild detour from what they were already exploring in the debut, more like a widescreen version of it, venturing out so much more at the edges of all the genres they touched. On top of it, and despite the bigger sound palette used, the urgency and tension of the debut remains intact here, something surely helped by the unusual format of the album - it’s actually a mix between studio and live recordings, with some songs taking from both types of performance even. Nowhere does it sound less cohesive because of that, while the overloading, cracklingly electric nature of the band’s typical sound is actually amplified. Anyway, if you read the little bio they have on each album on their own Bandcamp, you’ll see that on this one they add the likes of Nick Cave or PJ Harvey to the list of influences, which also makes perfect sense. Take ‘Took A Turn’, the very opener of proceedings, as a quick and obvious example - kicking off with a crushing Nick Thieneman bass rumble, Evan nevertheless then starts singing over an uncluttered, menacingly empty landscape which then builds and builds in loudness and intensity. It segues brilliantly into the catchy, razor-sharp riff of ‘Old Skin’, and by the time you’re screaming the song title in the chorus with reckless abandon alongside Evan you’ll be irretrievably hooked. Noise rock, yes, for sure, but also so much more than that, even emotionally - the most obvious example being ‘The Guitar’, a bluesy, uneasy ballad which Evan, in hindsight, actually considers it to be the first Jaye Jayle song, in a way. Where did he say that, you wonder? Well, maybe in a podcast episode that you’ll get to hear soon. I don’t know.
IN AND OUT OF YOUTH AND LIGHTNESS
(2011, Temporary Residence)
From recording at Kurt Ballou’s famous Godcity back to their hometown with Kevin Ratterman at The Funeral Home also signaled a significant shift in the Young Widows sound. Though still retaining its essential identity, especially with the extraordinarily versatile drummer that is Jeremy McMonigle fully settled in the band (he had joined right before ‘Old Wounds’, replacing Geoff Paton), the band shifted to a much moodier, darkly subtle approach with these songs, which are generally longer and with a slower burn than before. ‘In And Out…’ is a harder beast to tackle, as it doesn’t grab you by the throat with the immediacy that the previous records did. It’s hard to present a song from it as an instant highlight, and it demands to be sampled in its entirety before its shadowy richness can reveal itself in its full splendour. But it does, and it solidifies itself fully at the most unlikely of times - the last twenty minutes of the album, i.e. the last four songs (‘Rose Window’ is a bonus b-side), starting with ‘Right In The End’, which foreshadowed Jaye Jayle in great style, vibing heavily with a very Midwestern twang, dusty and bluesy, the noise rock grit of yore present more in mood than in actual sound, but still very much grinding roughly against your skin.
EASY PAIN
(2014, Temporary Residence)
Listening to ‘Easy Pain’ now, after all these years, and especially when put against the whole context of their catalogue, it sort of makes sense why the band took a bit of a discographic hiatus. Not that it shows any kind of inspiration loss, on the contrary, as it is actually the album where the Young Widows tentacles reach farther and wider. A dense and murky affair, and depending on the song you pick to illustrate it, it can even be perceived as a riff-heavy doom album or a bitter exercise in dark industrial rock. It almost seems like a reaction to the overall cleanliness of its glossier predecessor, especially with nasty bangers like ‘Kerosene Girl’, for instance, which rages and rants all over the place, a sludgy, wrong side of the road kind of rocker that you’d expect someone like Eyehategod to pull off, and it just might be the band’s heaviest song ever. ‘Easy Pain’ is the kind of bad mood record (and as much as we said before the world was a different place back then, this would actually be a perfect sonic representation of fucking world-on-fire 2025) that makes you wonder how the hell the band will follow it up each time you listen to it. Well, in their case, by taking a discographic break of eleven years, adding another band/entity to the mix in the meantime, and returning with a fucking rejuvenated blast of a record. It’s kinda taking the long way home, but it worked.
POWER SUCKER
(2025, Temporary Residence)
There’s something that sticks about the blurb on the press release that came with the advance promo and what Evan actually says about the album (as you’ll hear, yes, in the forthcoming podcast episode we did - watch this space!) - that it feels like a debut album all over again. It’s feeling that is almost palpable all through the record, of an inexhaustible energy and vitality. The infectious catchiness of these tunes is remarkable and you’ll be humming the chorus for opener ‘The Darkest Side’, cowering before the animated menace of ‘Total Fucking Clarity’, or swaying to the unstoppable groove of ‘Every Bone’, not to mention that banger from the video up there, ‘The Holy Net’, which is a percussive monster that would put most drummers to shame. There are just some of the highlights, but it’s as a whole piece that ‘Power Sucker’ really impresses, not only musically but also in the elegantly bitter way that Evan Patterson in particular expresses his anger at the various wrongs that plague the world today. While not an openly “political” album, depending how you define that, it is very much an empowering, fight-the-man kind of statement, and backed by the right kind of primal rage for that goal. Whether or not this approach is due to the fact that Evan has exorcised the more mellow and/or more moody aspects of his songwriting through the last few years with Jaye Jayle - as simplistic as that seems, there is definitely an element of that -, the fact is that Young Widows resurface in 2025 indeed feeling like a brand new, super excited power trio with a fiery debut in their hands. Not every band gets to throw down their fiercest, rawest, more direct album almost two decades into their career, and after eleven album-less years on top of it. But then again, Young Widows are far from being every band.
‘Power Sucker’ is out on March 21st via Temporary Residence. You can pre-order it here.
You can find Young Widows on Bandcamp, Instagram, Facebook and Spotify.
Catch them live soon if you’re lucky:
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