Photo by Sandra Vitayarat /RAT TV
For most rock bands, removing the guitar would feel like taking away the floor beneath them. For Tender Youth, it appears to have created considerably more room to move. On sophomore album Turning Torso, the Copenhagen-born, London-based four-piece largely abandon guitar in favour of distorted violin, using that limitation as the catalyst for their most adventurous music yet. Rather than softening their sound, the decision makes Tender Youth feel stranger, more physical and occasionally more confrontational.
The violin is crucial because the band refuse to treat it with the reverence traditionally afforded to the instrument. Fed through distortion and effects, it can scrape, howl and mutate until its identity becomes difficult to recognise. As the band explain, “Sometimes it doesn’t really sound like a violin anymore, and that’s what became interesting to us.”
That curiosity runs throughout the album’s ten tracks. Opener ‘Marina Drive’ establishes the record’s sprawling intensity, while ‘Portugal’ and ‘Erotica’ demonstrate how comfortably Tender Youth can move between theatrical art-rock and grittier industrial territory. Driving rhythms provide a muscular foundation beneath distorted strings and electronic textures, giving even the album’s more experimental passages a strong sense of momentum.
There are echoes of the theatrical chaos of Opus Kink and Man/Woman/Chainsaw alongside the darker electronic instincts associated with Depeche Mode, but Turning Torso is most interesting when Tender Youth simply follow their own curiosity. The absence of conventional guitar forces the arrangements into less predictable shapes.
That experimentation doesn’t mean abandoning emotion. Beneath the abrasion sits a record preoccupied with intimacy, relationships, trust and the increasingly complicated business of connecting with other people.
“The album tells a story through relationships, but it’s also about something bigger,” the band explain, pointing towards the alienation surrounding those individual connections.
It’s an effective thematic counterpart to the music. These are songs searching for closeness while their arrangements repeatedly pull familiar sounds out of familiar contexts. Tender Youth aren’t interested in providing tidy conclusions about intimacy, either. Naivety and trust are explored rather than judged, leaving vulnerability sitting alongside the record’s more aggressive instincts.
The album’s physicality also makes sense given the band’s history. Performances at Roskilde and SPOT Festival, extensive European touring and support slots with acts including Heavy Lungs have helped establish Tender Youth as a live proposition, and Turning Torso retains the feeling of music designed to occupy a room rather than simply exist through headphones.
Perhaps its greatest success, however, is demonstrating how productive subtraction can be. By removing the guitar, Tender Youth haven’t made their musical world smaller. They’ve forced themselves to discover what else could fill the space. Distorted violin, industrial electronics, restless rhythms and theatrical dynamics rush into the gap, pushing their version of rock somewhere considerably less comfortable.
On Turning Torso, limitation becomes liberation, and Tender Youth sound all the more exciting for having something taken away.
