Our featured album this week is “Boys Cry Too” by Belgian dream pop / indie rock band The Haunted Youth.
From the towering eight-minute opener “in my head” to the closing track “ghost girl”, the album lets go of restraint in favor of something more raw, blending fragile melodies with distortion and aggression to create a sound that feels both intimate and explosive. Here, the project of frontman Joachim Liebens, abandons the fragile, bedroom-pop innocence of Dawn Of The Freak – a debut that has since earned cult status back home – in favor of something far more confrontational and emotionally charged.
“I was a kid on Dawn Of The Freak,” reflects Liebens. “It sounds almost like nursery rhymes to me – everything is so fragile and childlike, like a cry for attention.” He pauses before breaking into a wide, Cheshire Cat grin. “And now I’m angsty and kicking in doors.”
While you can lose yourself in “wake up“’s icy morning-after-the-night-before regret, or the propulsive optimism of the New Order-like “i hear voices“, the mood is frequently one of anguish and aggression. Take “murder me“’s goth grunge thrash, or the ground zero annihilation represented in instrumental epic ‘falling to pieces’.
“I very much felt like a boy on this record. The last album was more androgynous in that respect, but this time I was really in touch with the male side of my emotions,” explains Liebens. “The first half of the record is basically how everyone sees a boy when he’s heartbroken: he puts his walls up, he’s paranoid, he’s angry, he’s aggressive. But then the second half is this whole other story – it’s vulnerable,” he continues. “I want to show the vulnerable part of men and boys and celebrate it instead of making it this whole stigma that’s been going on for so long.”
It’s material fuelled by emotional turmoil, see the defiant punk rock crunch of album focus track “forget me“. The shadowy “castlevania“, for instance, is described by Liebens as “the perfect triangle of Nirvana, Alice In Chains and My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.”
The band have just announced they’ll be playing their biggest headline show to-date at Lotto Arena in Antwerp on March 27, 2027.
“Boys Cry Too” is out now via Play It Again Sam. Buy it here and stream it below.
Tracklist:
- in my head
- castlevania
- deathwish
- emo song
- wake up
- hurt
- murder me
- falling to pieces
- i hear voices
- forget me
- ghost girl
