Since hearing Youth Lagoon's fabulous debut back in 2011, I've continually held an anticipation and curiosity for what's next from the man born Trever Powers. Most of his output, whether under his own name or pseudonym, hasn't resonated with me the way those dense yet delicate eight tunes on The Year of Hibernation did. Twelve years later, Heaven Is a Junkyard is the closest thing. 

Gone are the lo-fi aspects of Hibernation. The various electric keyboard tones have largely given way to piano, and Powers places immediacy on the vocals over the echoey distance previously embraced. That emphasis may or may not stem from a period in which he could barely speak because, according to his Bandcamp description of the album, "After taking an over-the-counter medication, Powers had a drug reaction so severe it turned his stomach into a 'non-stop geyser of acid,' coating his larynx and vocal cords for eight months." Something something art, suffering, something something, but hot damn! No wonder he's asking god to save the trapeze artist and whether that scrapheap glows like mercury.

Heaven Is a Junkyard may lack a cut that so succinctly sums up the Youth Lagoon aesthetic as well as 17, although, considering that's on the shortlist of songs I could continually binge till the end of time, I'm not about to hold that against him. At his best, and frequently here, Powers' music carries a lilting groove that couples with a childlike, nursery rhyme quality evocative of so many things juvenescence, yet equally "you must be 18 years of age or older" to fully understand the ride.