Music Review // Laundry Day – Younger Than I Was

I saw the genre-defying Laundry Day open for David Duchovny at the Tribeca Film Festival Music Lounge and they really made a lasting impression. The performance left me excited for their newest album to be dropped at the end of June. I finally got a chance to sit down and listen to Younger than I was Before, a 12-track album, including skits, with a runtime of 26 minutes.

The band consists of five members on vocals, drums, electric guitar, keyboard, and bass, who have all been with the group since 2018. Many of them are multi-instrumentalists and take on multiple roles in the band. Their gimmick is that they wear schoolboy uniforms and since they are so young it threw the Duchovny audience for a loop with someone exclaiming “a catholic schoolboy-band is about to play!” in apparent horror. The bass player assured her it’s just their thing, they aren’t catholic school students–although they did all meet in school. The logo on their sweater vests is the band’s name. They are all adults. It would have been fine either way, but it quieted down the tipsy audience.

The music on the album starts with Y.K.Y.NU.N.Y. which has a hip hop in the 90’s feel to it with groovy bass and drums, keyboard playing electronic string sounds, and lyrics about how “you know you need New York”. This song would make a great Tik Tok sound. Each song on the album is completely different with some sounding like 90’s hip hop, others like groovy soul, and others almost like a 2000’s boy band, some of them are more experimental than others. There are two lead singers in the band, each with his own distinct sound but the singers produce gorgeous harmonies together, some even in a falsetto such as on The Bus. A song called My Life features a lovely cameo by Matilda Marigolds and includes more of the impressive harmonies. Many of their song lyrics come across as very earnest and sincere such as in My Life “Every time I help myself, I hurt myself again” and in We All Gotta Find a Reason “My Mamma always told me if you believe in yourself, you got it homie.” My favorite track on the album is Dysmorphia with its catchy hook and lyrics “just imagine if you couldn’t see yourself in the mirror…would you love me even so?” It’s nicely incongruous to have such a catchy song with such serious lyrics.

There are 5 skits on the album before, after, and between the songs. They range from sounds of crossing the street and making one’s way into a theater before a performance, to a classroom of children declaring what they want to be when they grow up, layered over the sound of children playing on the playground. The skits flow nicely with the music, incorporating bits of the songs into the audio at times. This band recycles a lot of sounds from the past in a new way and it comes out feeling extremely fresh and cutting edge. Their webpage says they are committed to excellence and inspiring the youth and I suspect they are succeeding in those goals.