Each day of December this year, I’m highlighting one of my favourite albums of 2024. Counting down the list, we start with #31 on December 1st and go all the way down until we’ve reached #1 on December 31st. Today, #24 on my Album of the Year list: Hang Youth – ‘ER IS HOOP*’.

After releasing 7 albums in about 9 years time (from which 4 in 2015 alone, and the others between 2020 and 2021), it’s time for a new Hang Youth album. Knowing what this band has in store for us, we can kind of guess where ‘ER IS HOOP*’ (meaning: ‘there’s hope’) is going. We’re used to the Dutch band’s super anarchistic, angry punk songs with an average length of about 40 seconds per song. However, much to everyone’s surprise, this album features 12 songs in a time span of 27 minutes. That’s… pretty decent?!

The biggest surprise on ‘ER IS HOOP*’ is probably Hang Youth’s partnership with Thomas Azier, a Dutch artist known for releasing several well received solo albums as well as co-writing some songs on Stromae’s successful album ‘racine carrée’ (2013). Azier’s style is known to be pretty alternative and avant-garde, therefore this collaboration with Hang Youth – who are all about straightforward, unpolished punk, criticising pretty much everything that could be criticised – is quite an unexpected one. To be fair, it’s pretty nice having this breath of fresh air. We still get to hear the same fury and agitation as before – ‘BOM’ is a molotov-how to, ‘MALLOOT’ (meaning: ‘idiot’) tackles Dutch politics, and song titles like ‘DUIZENDJARIG WITTE RIJK’ (meaning: ‘millennium white empire’) and ‘GENOCIDE’ don’t leave much up to the imagination, either – but Hang Youth delivers all these topics with a sense of acceptance. Or perhaps acquiescence is a more suiting description. On ‘VANAAF’ (meaning: ‘tonight’), inspired by Spinvis’ iconic debut single ‘Smalfilm’, frontman Abel van Gijlswijk sings about how yet again, no revolution will be breaking out tonight. ‘VUILNISBAK’ (meaning: ‘bin‘) is all about needing hope to be able to enjoy a future. And then of course ‘LA LA LA’, the most literal example of all the former: “I’m pissed, I’m boiling with rage! But there’s no place for this anger to go, so instead I’ll sing: la la la.” Life’s tough and it’s up to us to fight the evil, but how can we even begin fighting that evil if we don’t have a sense of hope ourselves.