Gang of Youths have reemerged glowing on the serene “Things Take Time,” a buoyant, golden-hued meditation on patience, transformation, and the sacred hiding inside ordinary life. Speaking with Atwood Magazine, Tom Hobden and Jung Kim reflect on the years of living that shaped the song, the restraint defining its sound, and the creative evolution carrying the Australian band toward their forthcoming fourth album, ‘Compañero.’

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Stream: “Things Take Time” – Gang of Youths

Maybe patience is less about waiting for something to happen and more about accepting that transformation is already happening while you wait.

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Four years of silence have left Gang of Youths glowing.

Their first new song since 2022’s angel in realtime., “Things Take Time,” is the kind of return that somehow sounds worn-in and brand new at once – a beautifully dreamy, golden-hued reintroduction built less around grandeur than grace. David Le’aupepe’s voice rises from an airy bed of piano and lightly held instrumentation, warm and impassioned without ever disturbing the song’s serenity, while trumpet, strings, and an irresistibly buoyant melody slowly gather around him. The refrain is almost impossibly simple – “Things take time / Take time” – and that simplicity becomes its magic. Gang of Youths have made a smile-inducing singalong about surrendering to forces bigger than ourselves, and it burns bright precisely because nobody seems interested in forcing the flame.

Over the past decade, Gang of Youths have grown from an Australian rock band into one of their country’s most celebrated exports, building a career around emotionally enormous songs, sweeping arrangements, and David Le’aupepe’s deeply personal writing. Their 2017 album Go Farther In Lightness became a major breakthrough, while 2022’s angel in realtime. pushed their ambitions even further: A 67-minute tribute to Le’aupepe’s late father that braided the band’s soaring rock sound with Pacific Island music, orchestral textures, and a searching meditation on grief, family, heritage, and what our loved ones leave behind. By then based in London, Gang of Youths were still reaching outward musically even as the record pulled Le’aupepe more deeply into his own history.

Now, four years later, Gang of Youths are beginning to reveal what came next. Their fourth album, Compañero, arrives March 12, 2027, with “Things Take Time” serving as its first glimpse. The record promises a broader shift in perspective for the band – one that reaches beyond the deeply autobiographical writing that has long defined Le’aupepe’s work while holding onto the emotional scale and curiosity at Gang of Youths’ core.

There’s heaven in the suburbs
And if I’m asking what I feel now
Do-do-do, Do-do-do
So high
I kissed the Earth around me once
A thousand times

“Heaven in the suburbs” feels like an apt place for Gang of Youths to reappear.

After years spent largely outside the churn of an album cycle, the band return attuned to smaller revelations: Ordinary life, gradual change, the sacred hiding inside what once might have seemed mundane. Tom Hobden says the phrase was present from the song’s earliest stages, “a completely abstract but somehow loaded collection of words” that became a roadmap for where “Things Take Time” wanted to go. “For me, it’s about finding the sacred in the everyday,” he explains. “Perhaps there’s something in there too about the song emerging after a period where we’d all just been getting on with actually living our lives.”

Living, in this case, is part of the writing process. Gang of Youths have never moved especially quickly between records, and Hobden sees those gaps as inseparable from a catalog where the personal and musical remain deeply intertwined. angel in realtime. wrestled with grief, newfound family, and Le’aupepe’s relationship to a heritage he was still coming to understand; four years later, the band are different people with different tastes, instincts, and experiences to metabolize. “Significant things happen, they take time to digest, and eventually they find their way into musical form,” Hobden says. “Maybe patience is less about waiting for something to happen and more about accepting that transformation is already happening while you wait.”

The song embeds that idea directly into its arrangement. Le’aupepe first brought in the piano part and developed the song with drummer Donnie Borzestowski, consciously aiming for something succinct and earnest with a straightforward pop structure. But Gang of Youths quietly bend that structure as “Things Take Time” unfolds: Its verses and choruses stretch longer as the song progresses, allowing time itself to seem as though it is expanding around the listener. The effect is subtle enough to register emotionally before intellectually. Nothing announces the trick. The song simply keeps opening.

Jung Kim’s production gives that expansion room to breathe. Rather than crowding the track with processing, the band keep its foundations organic and dry, allowing melody to bear much of the emotional weight. Hobden’s playful trumpet curls around Le’aupepe’s vocal almost like another singer, while strings gradually deepen the arrangement without swallowing its intimacy. Drums pulse gently beneath them; piano provides the song’s steady center. Even as the instrumentation grows richer, “Things Take Time” retains an extraordinary lightness – serene enough to drift inside, catchy enough that its refrain seems lodged in the body after a single listen.

“It was important for the sonics to be rooted in things that felt very organic,” Kim explains. “I think the goal always was for the instrumentation to be light, so employing very little processing and keeping things very dry was key. This created space so that the focus could be on the melodic aspects of the music which ultimately carry the emotional journey, those being the orchestral elements and Dave’s vocal.”

Restraint itself marks an evolution for a band long associated with emotionally enormous music.

Gang of Youths have lost none of their ambition; they have simply discovered how much can happen inside open space. “Things Take Time” still swells, still reaches, still carries the unmistakable ache and uplift of Le’aupepe’s singing, but its power comes through accumulation rather than detonation. A trumpet phrase here, another stretch of melody there, strings entering at just the right moment – each addition nudges the song upward until its warmth feels almost communal.

How long?
Will you become the one you will become?
Another fall in the flow, sometimes
The engine grows around me
Like a stranger or a vine

The question at the song’s center – “How long will you become the one you will become?” – gets to the heart of its relationship with time. Becoming has no finish line. Jung describes the lyric as an open-ended question about the growth we undergo throughout life, carrying both “the dread” of change and “the yearning for it.” “Things Take Time” holds those impulses together without demanding that either one win. Birth gives way to growth, growth to death, death to whatever comes next; even the band describe the song, with characteristic understatement, as being about “the endless loop of birth, growth, death and rebirth which encases all matter and energy or whatever.” The music meets that enormity with a grin instead of a sermon.

It makes “Things Take Time” a particularly beautiful statement of intent for Gang of Youths’ next chapter. Four years away have not produced a band desperate to prove how much they can still do. They return sounding comfortable enough to leave air in the room, confident enough to let a melody repeat, and wise enough to know that a fresh start need not erase what came before it. The song carries history without dragging it behind itself. Everything here seems to move forward naturally, at its own pace.

Across Compañero, that evolution reaches beyond one song. After a decade in which Le’aupepe repeatedly drew music from grief, trauma, identity, and his own most difficult experiences, Gang of Youths entered this record from the unfamiliar position of being relatively alright. “I had this realization that I didn’t need to channel all this brutality anymore,” Le’aupepe says. “I used to do that out of some shame about being an artist. But I began looking at my life and experience, and began to think that making art is a worthwhile thing to continue exploring in itself.” That freedom opened the band toward a broader kind of songwriting, but not smaller questions: Compañero remains preoccupied with mortality, connection, and what it means to stay alive alongside the people who accompany us through it. Its title – a Spanish word for companion, partner, or comrade – makes that sense of shared passage explicit.

Jung hopes listeners leave this era with “a sense of elation, knowing that although we can’t run from time, the passing of it does lead to some good.” “Things Take Time” makes that good audible. Its warmth, gentleness, and infectious refrain turn patience from passive waiting into a quiet act of faith – faith that life is still working on us even when we cannot yet see what it is making.

Four years of silence have left Gang of Youths glowing because those years were never empty.

They were living, changing, becoming. Buoyant and quietly triumphant, “Things Take Time” is the radiant sound of finally hearing what all that time made possible.

Atwood Magazine recently caught up with Tom Hobden and Jung Kim to step inside the patience, restraint, and lived experience behind “Things Take Time” – a song born from allowing life to happen first and trusting the music to follow when it was ready. Our conversation opens the door a little wider on where Gang of Youths have been, how they got here, and what it means to move forward without rushing the transformation.

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:: pre-order Compañero here ::

:: stream/purchase Things Take Time here ::

:: connect with Gang of Youths here ::

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Stream: “Things Take Time” – Gang of Youths

A CONVERSATION WITH GANG OF YOUTHS

Tom Hobden: First of all, thank you for your patience! It’s been a hot minute since we were last around but rest assured we’ve been busy. We’re returning now with a new single called “Things Take Time,” which felt like the right track to lead with in this new cycle because it’s a statement of intent for us – to move into new territory in terms of our sound and songwriting.

Jung Kim: A pleasure! Probably something from The Positions… “Radioface” and “The Overpass” would be my picks…

Jung Kim: That was quite some time ago… I look back at the person I was making that record and how much my taste and proclivities have changed since. That’s not to say I’m not still proud of it, it’s a record about grief and newfound family as well as connecting with a heritage I knew very little about – I have a deeper understanding of these things because of angel in realtime, which I’m grateful for.

Jung Kim: It’s the most concise GOY song yet and it felt fresh to share something of that sort. I suppose as well that there’s this joyous quality to the music which we felt was important to step into this new chapter with.

Tom Hobden: We’ve spent a considerable amount of time away since the last album cycle – living our lives, growing in all sorts of ways and, as ever, working things out through music. If you’ve followed Gang of Youths over the years, you’ll know there tend to be fairly long gaps between records, and with hindsight I think that’s because the personal and the musical have always been so intertwined for us. Significant things happen, they take time to digest, and eventually they find their way into musical form.

The process itself has moved through distinct phases and different studios, all the way through to Dave writing and singing in my back garden studio. To me, the song ruminates on that passing of time and that familiar cycle, but almost from the perspective of an outside witness. I think there’s something strangely reassuring in recognising that you can’t really rush any of it – things have to be allowed to begin, change, end and become something else. Maybe patience is less about waiting for something to happen and more about accepting that transformation is already happening while you wait.

Tom Hobden: As far as I can recall, that lyric was there right from the beginning – a completely abstract but somehow loaded collection of words that became a kind of roadmap for where the song instinctively wanted to go. For me, it’s about finding the sacred in the everyday. Perhaps there’s something in there too about the song emerging after a period where we’d all just been getting on with actually living our lives.

Jung Kim: I suppose that lyric is a rhetorical question about the growth we all undergo throughout the course of life. It’s a rather open-ended question which begs to discern the imminence of change and perhaps the dread of it, or even the yearning for it.

Tom Hobden: Dave came up with the piano part, jammed it with Donnie on drums and really it was a case of consciously writing something succinct and almost earnest in tone from the off. There’s nothing complicated about it. At heart, it’s got a pretty straightforward pop structure – the only thing we played with was making the verses and choruses a little longer as the song progresses, working with the idea of time around us expanding.

As GOY songs go, it really did feel effortless in how it emerged so the last thing you want to do in those moments is overcomplicate things! Lean a little more into the emotional heft of the arrangement as the song grows and make sure you don’t outstay your welcome and you’re basically there!

Jung Kim: It was important for the sonics to be rooted in things that felt very organic… i think the goal always was for the instrumentation to be light, so employing very little processing and keeping things very dry was key. This created space so that the focus could be on the melodic aspects of the music which ultimately carry the emotional journey, those being the orchestral elements and Dave’s vocal.

Tom Hobden: The playful trumpet line accompanying Dave’s vocal, almost like a duet, came early. From there it was about leaning into the emotional weight that strings can offer as the song progresses, while making sure they never overpower it to the point of melodrama. It might sound strange, but we really wanted to leave room for Dave to sing – to let his voice carry the emotional weight rather than having the arrangement do all the work around him. Approaching the instrumentation was a lesson in restraint first and foremost, a mindset we’ve been conscious of applying more readily, let’s say, compared to previous albums.

Jung Kim: I feel GOY’s sound will always aim to be ambitious no matter the scale or enormity. Our interest in making music is to always explore different sonic landscapes. It’s hard to predict what that might be next, but I can say it’ll be eclectic.

Jung Kim: A sense of elation, knowing that although we can’t run from time, the passing of it does lead to some good.

Pierre Daven-Keller – Kino Music

Luke Howard & Nadje Noordhuis – Ten Sails

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:: pre-order Compañero here ::

:: stream/purchase Things Take Time here ::

:: connect with Gang of Youths here ::

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Stream: “Things Take Time” – Gang of Youths

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