As Young the Giant wrapped up its show on Friday, singer Sameer Ghadia held his microphone out to the crowd to sing the chorus of “Mind Over Matter,” the title track from the indie rock band’s 2014 second album.
“And if the world don’t break, I’ll be shakin’ it,” the audience sang back at the stage as Ghadia and the other four members of Young the Giant played on. “‘Cause I’m a young man after all. And when the seasons change, will you stand by me?”
A few hours earlier, in the greenroom backstage at the Inglewood arena, Ghadia took a few minutes before the show to talk about its new album “Victory Garden,” and how it was born out of the turmoil that’s roiled the current decade since its start.
Coming out of 2022’s “American Bollywood” album, a kind of concept album, Ghadia said, Young the Giant wanted to “get back to the joy of making music in a room together, being a rock band, and getting back to the simplicity of just five guys in a room.”
It wasn’t as easy as they’d thought, he said. “The L.A. fires had just happened, we’d come out of an extreme time with COVID, there was the political landscape of not only America but the world,” Ghadia said.
“We realized that not only for our fans, but for us, Young the Giant has always been kind of a beacon of hope,” he continued. “We wanted to be able to use this work, I think, like we always have, to put something beautiful and positive into the world.”
The show on Friday, which included nine of the 11 tracks on the new album, delivered beautifully on that goal, opening as the album does with “Evergreen” and 22 songs and an hour and 40 minutes later, with an instrumental version of the final track, “Life is a Long Goodbye, as the band waved farewell.
Like any Young the Giant album, the music is marvelously melodic. “Evergreen” features lush harmony vocals to underscore the lyric’s message of victory gardens and planting seeds for positive growth. A pretty take on “Superposition” followed, before the band returned to the new material for “Bitter Garden,” a song Ghadia had described as an ode to seeing the world through the eyes of a child.
“Having two young boys, in those experiences they have that you witness, you kind of go back into memories that you had as a child that require you then to process them again,” he’d said before the show. “It can be painful because we see how the adults that we become are so formed by the children that we were. And we oftentimes lose sight of that child in a society that forces people to grow up very quickly.
“So being able to see them experience the world so naively … they just feel like everything is connected. And that comes with a concept of universal empathy. That was a big guiding force.”
A quartet of songs from Young the Giant’s “Home of the Strange” drew big cheers from fans as “Repeat,” “Mr. Know-It-All,” “Silvertongue,” and “Something to Believe” ran one after another in a 10th anniversary celebration of that record.
[Cold War Kids, who’d toured with Young the Giant on the Home of the Strange Tour in 2017, are opening for them again this year. Both bands have shared roots, Young the Giant from Irvine, Cold War Kids from Long Beach and Fullerton, and fans responded enthusiastically to Cold War Kids songs such as “Hospital Beds,” “Hang Me Up to Dry,” and “First.”]
“Already There” brought the set back to “Victory Garden,” this soaring anthem showing off, like many of the songs, the tightness of a band that Ghadia described from the stage as brothers after the two decades or so that he, guitarists Jacob Tilly and Eric Cannata, bassist Payam Doostzadeh and drummer Francois Comtois have been together.
“Different Kind of Love,” the first single from the new record, is also the band’s first-ever No. 1 hit, having recently reached the top of the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart. It, like other new songs, reflects a recurrent theme of “radical empathy,” the idea that love and empathy for others or yourself are especially important when they’re not simple or easy to offer.
“We’re all products of how we are raised,” Ghadia said before the show. “We have desires. We take things for granted. We have our own mental battles that we have to deal with. And to move forward past those things, it can never be from a place of hatred of yourself, because that doesn’t really work.
“You can try and change for other people, for other things, but at the end of the day, the only way that you can truly do it is by really caring about your own well-being,” he said. “In a way, this was also me getting back to being like, ‘It’s OK to say that you love yourself.’”
The second half of the show switched between new and old with the songs blending seamlessly, despite the years between them and the variety of musical styles the group has explored over time.
Highlights included new songs such as “Mona Lisa,” a dance-y number with a terrifically funky bassline, and the back-to-back pairing of “This Too Shall Pass” and “Ships Passing.”
Earlier hits such as “My Body” and “Cough Syrup,” both of which reached the Top 5 on the Alternative Airplay chart in 2011, drew huge cheers, with fans singing loudly along to the choruses.
Many of the crises that inspired the songwriting for “Victory Garden” still remain, Ghadia said before the show in the greenroom deep inside the Forum. But that’s no reason not to try to build communities – or call them gardens of people – to make a better world.
“It’s very difficult, even difficult for us,” Ghadia said of keeping hope and love alive at times. “It’s not like we’ve reached some higher level of enlightenment or anything like that. We’re still inundated with it. I don’t think there’s ever a finish line that you get to.
“It’s a balance that all of us have to navigate in real time,” he continued. “Trying to be in control of things that you have control of, which is within your community, and being mindful of what’s happening within that community.
“But we do feel like empathy, and radical empathy, has always been a form of resistance historically,” Ghadia said. “It’s very difficult to make a large sweeping political action reflect that, but I think when it starts in local communities and starts with being able to help build your garden and create that.
“We just hope that people can listen to this record and try and pass that on to each other through a moment of inspiration. It’s not like we have an answer to the problem, you know. If anything, this record is a reminder for us to continue to do that.”