After a seven-year hiatus, Boise-based Trevor Powers has returned to Youth Lagoon with the release of Heaven Is a Junkyard. Powers moved on from the creative outlet in 2015, writing at the time that “there is nothing left to say through Youth Lagoon”. His return to the project is an insightful meditation on personal struggle and a shift in mental perspective during his hiatus. Deeply fascinated with the psychological, psychedelic, and spiritual recesses of the creative mind, Heaven is the realisation by Powers that Youth Lagoon still has much more to say.

Powers has been making music under his own name since the 2015 release of Savage Hills Ballroom — the last album released as Youth Lagoon — but in 2021 his artistic output was interrupted by a health crisis. A reaction to an over-the-counter medication caused him to temporarily lose his ability to speak, leading to a lengthy battle to reclaim his health and the ability to perform. The scorching influence of that experience lingers throughout Heaven, most notably in the track “Trapeze Artist”, and seems to underpin the shifts that led Powers to return to Youth Lagoon.

Heavily inspired by cinematic influences, the music videos that accompany Heaven provide a kaleidoscopic refraction of this album’s vision, and the latest evolution of Youth Lagoon’s aesthetic. Peppered with dramatic shots of middle-American wastelands, picturesque fields of the rural outback, and tired-looking streets, the visual landscape of the music videos both compare and contrast the album’s eclectically assembled soundscape. Desolate and parched landscapes appear throughout these videos, often traversed by Powers’s frail figure in pursuit of phantoms and memories that seem more real than the landscape. Altogether, it’s harder now to determine where Powers ends and Youth Lagoon begins, but the project nevertheless remains committed to the experimental sound and outlaw-ethos that engendered the pre-hiatus work.