Guv - Warmer Than Gold Guv

Warmer Than Gold, the new album from Ben Cook’s project GUV, is a document of a life in music, a critical and celebratory travelogue, an attempt to transcend the homogeneous and status-obsessed conditions of the contemporary world through the use of big beats, big choruses, and distortion. It’s a record made on the go that makes sense anywhere. And most of all, with its expanded sonic palette and emphasis on breakbeats, it ushers in the newest era of an artist who has never stopped growing.

Cook, who grew up moving between Toronto and England, boasts anglo bonafides that separate him from the growing pack of hardcore kids sporting windbreakers and bowl cuts. Two of the first shows he attended, at the age of 12, were Oasis and Neil Young. After the show, he remembers thinking, “Yeah, I’m gonna do music forever.” Not long after he discovered hardcore and punk, and it was off to the races, first with his beloved hardcore band, No Warning (who he continues to play with to this day), then as a member of punk experimentalists, Fucked Up, from 2007 to 2021–and all the while building a deep and impressive catalog of solo work first as Young Governor, then Young Guv, and now simply, GUV (“I’m not so young anymore, three letter band names are cool, and I’m tired of being mistaken for a rapper,” Cook notes).

Warmer Than Gold is the widescreen culmination of all of these threads. The album’s music retains the hooky spirit of Cook’s previous records, like the acclaimed double albums GUVI & II and GUV III & IV, but it adds a decidedly rhythmic element informed by classic Madchester and Britpop. It smears and soars, it feels like bolting down the M1 Motorway at midnight, propelled by an urgency unseen in Cook’s other work. What is retained from
those earlier power pop releases, though, is the artist’s sharp ear for hooks; now combined with a recharged production sensibility inspired by everyone from the Beastie Boys to The Field Mice to Primal Scream, Cook is able to musically support the core lyrical themes that run throughout the project: the global flattening of culture, the passage of time in the material world, and the artist’s role within all of it.