Youth Lagoon, the alias of Idaho-based producer and composer Trevor Powers, returns with a new single/video, “My Beautiful Girl.” Much like entering a dream, Powers’ worlds often feel like oddly familiar fragments of a childhood memory. “Songwriting just feels like receiving messages from a portal and transcribing them,” says Powers. “Some nights I’ll wake up at 3 am and words feel like they’re bludgeoning my skull with a baseball bat. Most times, I don’t even know what they mean. I don’t think I’m supposed to. It’s only my job to listen, be constant, and write them down. And if I’m not a faithful steward of that job, those words will find someone else who is.” In 2023, Powers released the acclaimed Heaven Is a Junkyard, an album of warped Americana that brought his focus back home. “I realized everything worth writing about is happening inside my house or right next door,” he says. “There’s an eternity of secrets in the American suburbs.” With Pitchfork awarding it “Best New Music” as well as landing in their top 50 albums of the year and The Guardian dubbing it a “masterpiece,” Youth Lagoon’s first album in 8 years pushed the project into a neo-western realm both deeply literary and musically vast, centered around an upright piano and static-coated electronics. “I killed off Youth Lagoon years ago because I lost who I was,” says Powers. “Then life jumped me in an alley and gave me a beating. That suffering changed my frequency. Now my ideas are a river. I can’t keep up.”