News

Young Legionnaire Announce Debut Album

• 16th Feb 2011

YOUNG LEGIONNAIRE set to release debut full-length album ‘Crisis Works’ on May 9 through Wichita Recordings / Joining Les Savy Fav on UK tour across Feb and March 2011/ US shows and SXSW March 2011

FREE DOWNLOAD: link

Formed by Paul Mullen formerly of yourcodenameis:milo and Gordon Moakes of
Bloc Party, YOUNG LEGIONNAIRE are finally set to release their HUGE debut album ‘Crisis Works’ on May 9 through Wichita Recordings (The Bronx, Conor Oberst, Bloc Party, Best Coast).

'Crisis Works' is loosely concerned with the idea that crisis can kind of be engineered around us to make us more pliable. As Gordon explains; 'We're living with a siege mentality about recession and spending cuts; that's becoming the narrative for our times. But it's that siege mentality that makes it easier to confer 'difficult' decisions on us from above. It's an excuse, but also an opportunity.' The record, he says, is about 'global economics, but it's probably more about the crisis principle on a personal level, how it affects your own decisions and thoughts'.

Produced by Rich Jackson (Future Of The Left, The Automatic, The Chapman Family), the band’s first single/up front track ‘Chapter, Verse’ got its first, debut spin on Radio 1 with Zane Lowe on Monday 7 Feb and is also available to download now from link. The album follows on from the release of their debut, double A Side ‘Colossus/Iron Dream’ through Holy Roar in August 2010 and will be available on CD, 12” vinyl and digital download.

Live wise, following on from two recent tours with Pulled Apart by Horses, the band will see in 2011 supporting Les Savy Fav across February and March ahead of a summer of festivals, including The Great Escape and Sonisphere. They will also be heading to Austin for SXSW and will be playing a number of shows in the US through March.

YOUNG LEGIONNAIRE initially started following a chance meeting between Paul and Gordon during the recording sessions for the Print Is Dead album in 2006, where Gordon guested on the track ‘Wait a Minute’ with Paul and the rest of YCNI:M. Some more conversations followed, eventually leading to their first rehearsals together as a band in 2009 (with Will Bowerman on drums, formerly of I Was A Cub Scout, now of La Roux). The songs took shape over the course of occasional writing sessions, eventually becoming more concrete when the band were joined full-time by drummer Dean Pearson.

The album is about volume and noise, but also something more subtle, as Gordon puts it; ‘The idea was to make a big, juddering noise but weave a trail of melody through it’. He goes on; ‘Even though the format of guitar, bass, drums and vocal is established, is nothing ground-breaking, the possibilities are endless. There's always another riff to write, a heavier sound to find. And we're looking for the magic in the gaps between the riffs too. There's a tenderness to it, a fragility almost, that we stumbled upon, and I'm inspired by that, to explore that. The record is about the brutal, the fragile and the possible.’