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Feb 3, 2023‘Heavy Heavy’ is a passionate, soulful and often mesmerising work that will stick around long past the first listen. Succinct and underpinned by a catchy melodic structure, it continues Young Fathers’ peerless run of singular albums and further cements them as one of the more unique acts to exist today.
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Feb 1, 2023Unique, raw and totally joyous.
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Jan 30, 2023Heavy Heavy is rarely an easy listen, but it's never less than engrossing.
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Feb 2, 2023Heavy Heavy is a short, sharp blast of energy that never outstays its welcome. ... The year may be only one month old, but the first truly great album of 2023 has arrived.
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Feb 7, 2023Young Fathers don't owe us anything except themselves, which Heavy Heavy feels like a true and warmly sincere extension of, a hand extended from the light across the dark, if we're willing to let go and take it.
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Feb 2, 2023We’ve had plenty of music in recent years that reckons with global and personal heaviness and offers comfort or therapeutic release or reassurance. On Heavy Heavy, Young Fathers render it all powerless, the darkness just a blank canvas on which every burst of light and hope becomes all the more brilliant.
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Feb 3, 2023Heavy, Heavy never buckles. As a testament to the constant, psychological stresses of being an artist in the 2020s, it is bright, inventive, vulnerable, and rewarding. Pressure making diamonds and all that… maybe there’s something to it.
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Feb 28, 2023Sure, these songs are dense, but they are dense, triumphant pop songs. They will make you want to get on up and turn it loose.
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Feb 16, 2023Heavy Heavy pulls in the listener with an empathetic lust for life that, whether brimming with optimism, steeling for a threat to survival, or reckoning with a perceived futility of existence, somehow never wavers.
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Feb 6, 2023Over 10 tracks, Heavy Heavy retains the band’s urgent energy – the yelps and driving drums of I Saw and sub-bass breakbeats of Shoot Me Down – but that vitality works in service to an overall, infectious optimism.
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Feb 3, 2023‘Heavy Heavy’ sees them fully marry their two sides; is this a very fun album from a very serious band, or a very serious album from a very fun band? Why not both? Young Fathers can have it both ways.
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Feb 1, 2023The rhythm-laden new record sounds more relaxed than their old ones. The band’s sound has matured.
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Jan 31, 2023Heavy Heavy may be a little too sweet for long-time listeners, but its massive choruses, strong hooks and ecstatic sound too timely and too powerful to deny.
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Jan 30, 2023Young Fathers remain a frequently forbidding proposition, and all the better for it. Thrillingly, it's still impossible to predict what we might hear next in any of their tracks. [Mar 2023, p.88]
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UncutJan 30, 2023Mostly they don't sound like anyone except themselves, multiplied by a thousand. [Mar 2023, p.36]
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Jan 30, 2023Their unpredictability and magnetic power remain undimmed by the years.
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Feb 7, 2023Heavy Heavy sweeps its listener along, churchlike, and conveys the feeling that resisting the urge will always feel worse than rising up and pushing the air from your lungs. And then, after a brief 10 tracks, it’s all over—as if the procession has marched on, out of earshot. But the invite is still there extended: It’s up to you whether to accept it or not.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 26 out of 29
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Mixed: 2 out of 29
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Negative: 1 out of 29
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Feb 6, 2023
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Feb 3, 2023Great instrumentation! Catchy songs. The lyrics could be more insightful, but overall very varied track list.
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May 8, 2023