Youth: Sunday, Nov. 27

What's in a name? When it comes to Youth, just about everything.

[POP] In recent weeks, Youth has been pulling opening-act duties across the West. This is the band's first, as drummer Stephen Leisy puts it, "non-house-show tour."

"Typhoon has wanted to bring us on tour for a while," says guitarist and vocalist Maggie Morris via cell phone, sitting in a car with her bandmates outside the Hi-Dive in Denver. "Finally, they told their booking agent that if we didn't get to go with them, they weren't going to go."

The tour was quite a leap forward for a band that is only a year old and was, until recently, strictly a studio project between Leisy and guitarist-vocalist Elec Morin. "The first time Steve and I played a song together," Morin says, "it was this nine-minute, layered instrumental that sounds nothing like what we do now."

These days, Youth sounds like an easygoing pop act that flirts with twee (reverb-heavy guitar and unfussy playing) while wisely avoiding the overly cute and cloying aspects that often make the genre unlistenable. The few recordings the band has leaked into the digital world feel more akin to the tanned and drowsy world of Morris' native California than our damp climes. It's a sound that dovetails nicely with the band's un-Googleable name. "The music market is targeted at a youth audience," Leisy says of their sobriquet. "So we thought we could try and capture that within the band name."

Leisy and company also cop to falling prey to the follies of youth. The band hurried out on tour only a week after finishing its debut self-released EP, June, leaving no time to get any copies pressed or even burned. "We had to do the DIY thing," Morris says, "and bought a bunch of postcards, stamping them [with a download code] and selling them on the way." (Youth promises to have actual CDs for its release show Sunday at Holocene.)

After that, the four-piece is looking at all the things a relatively new band should: more recording and touring, possibly working with a label that will help get some vinyl pressed and, maybe, driving to Austin, Texas, for SXSW. Of that last notion, the band's literal youth pops up again: Says Leisy with a laugh, "Oh, yeah! We need to get on that."


SEE IT: Youth plays Holocene on Sunday, Nov. 27, with Port St. Willow, Ben Seretan and the Early, the Woolen Men, and DJ vs. Nature. 8:30 pm. $3. 21+.

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