Music

In March 2023, Young Gun Silver Fox played in Los Angeles for the first time, selling out a show at the Troubadour. Though the duo is U.K.-based, the pair have an uncanny mastery of the sound that gushed out of elite L.A. recording studios in the second half of the 1970s — polished, wistful, harmony-soaked, groove-based pop. After releasing three albums, earning the opportunity to perform in the birthplace of their beloved style felt momentous. “That was like taking the music back to its spiritual home,” says Shawn Lee, one of Young Gun Silver Fox’s co-founders. Several of the duo’s devoted followers felt similarly: “We had people coming out from Europe saying, ‘we wanted to see you play in L.A.’”

Young Gun Silver Fox will release its fifth album, Pleasure, on May 2. For listeners who see the West Coast ecosystem that incubated hits for Michael McDonald, George Benson, Christopher Cross and Michael Jackson as a pinnacle of pop, Young Gun Silver Fox represent “the modern day gold standard,” according to Greg Caz, an American DJ who specializes in rare groove, yacht rock, and Brazilian music. 

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“The best Young Gun Silver Fox songs stand right next to anything that was done in L.A. circa 1978 and 1979,” Caz continues. “You could swap them in for an Ambrosia record or a Kenny Loggins record or a Pages album” — which Caz does in his sets. 

In decades past, faithfulness to this source material might not have garnered high praise. “For a lot of critics back then, there was a whole view of this style of music as corporate, empty, too slick, too smooth,” Caz notes. “It just felt too good to people, too candy-sweet,” jokes Terry Cole, founder of the soul and funk label Colemine Records. Critics “didn’t feel nearly enough angst.” (Cole partnered with Young Gun Silver Fox to release 2020’s Canyons in North America through his Karma Chief subsidiary.) 

That negative view persisted for decades, blending with the late 1970s disco backlash into a potent cocktail of rejection. “I fully expected to be totally forgotten by the end of the 1980s,” McDonald said in the recent movie Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary.

It’s not surprising, then, that when Young Gun Silver Fox started writing their debut album, 2015’s West End Coast, they felt that “there wasn’t a band that was reclaiming that music as their own,” Lee says. While that meant that Lee and his co-founder Andy Platts’ efforts were often overlooked, there are advantages to running your own race. “It felt wide open,” Lee continues. “We had the luxury of doing something that nobody else was doing at that time.”

In an about-face, though, music that was once derided as “dad rock” — or described glibly as “yacht rock” — has now been reappraised and embraced. Some listeners “come to it jokingly,” says one of the commenters in Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary. “But then you suddenly find yourself appreciating it sincerely.”

It remains to be seen if that newfound goodwill extends to modern purveyors of this classic sound. But if it does, few groups are better positioned to benefit than Young Gun Silver Fox. 

“They’re gaining momentum now,” says Tom Nixon, co-host of the podcast Out of the Main, which focuses on “yacht rock, west coast AOR, and related sophisticated music.” “This stuff is extremely popular in pockets of Europe, specifically the Northern parts, and in Japan — more popular than it is in the United States. It’s still gaining in popularity here: When I joined the yacht rock Facebook group [six years ago] it had 5,000 members. Last time I looked there were 168,000.” 

In conversation, Lee is grizzled and gregarious, quick to cackle, and prone to starry-eyed digressions about music’s overwhelming power and his partner’s formidable songwriting chops. Platts is more reserved — though not on record, where his voice is remarkably pliant, capable of head-turning, Jackson-indebted leaps (“Moonshine”) and meticulously soothing multi-part harmonies that reach for Crosby, Stills and Nash (“Sierra Nights”).

The duo typically write and record parts separately — while they’re both based in the U.K., they live about two hours apart, and also pursue other musical projects — and email them back and forth until they end up with a finished song. But this process stopped working when they began to craft the follow-up to 2023’s Shangri-La. “On the previous albums, when we started the first few tracks, you almost could smell what the record was going to be, see the blueprint for where it could go,” Platts says. This time around, though, he felt he “wasn’t getting there.”

So the pair tossed convention out of the window and agreed to meet for in-person writing sessions. This approach immediately proved fruitful — on day one, Lee and Platts knocked out the instrumentals for three tracks that made it onto Pleasure, including the first two singles.

With each of their past albums, Young Gun Silver Fox aimed to “change the palette,” as Platts puts it — clearing room for more horns on Canyons, injecting more acoustic guitar into Shangri-La. With Pleasure, they wanted to make sure the pace didn’t sag. “Downtempo stuff is really easy to relax into,” Lee explains. “You don’t want to be lazy and play a whole set of dirge classics.”

There’s nothing dirge-like about “Just for Pleasure,” which reaches for the heights of disco-era Heatwave with its beefy three-note bass and thwacking drums. And the second single, “Late Night Last Train,” hums at an unimpeachable frequency, propulsive but misty-eyed. Platts called this blissed-out territory “Fleetwood Mac meets Delegation” on Instagram.  

“Every one of our albums has a song that lives in that world,” Lee says. “We know there’s gold in them thar hills,” he adds, cracking himself up.

Young Gun Silver Fox will follow Pleasure with another U.S. tour in the fall, playing in 500 – 700 capacity rooms. Hardcore fans love that they are “keeping the fire” for that glorious L.A. studio sound. (“Keeping the fire” in place of “carrying the torch,” according to Nixon, because it references a Loggins song.) But the duo are primarily focused on meeting their own high standards. “I just keep the field of vision to me and Shawn,” Platts says. “If this record is good, then everything else doesn’t really matter, as long as we got that right.” 

With Pleasure, initially “we weren’t getting that right,” he adds. “We needed to switch it up for something to happen. And then once we did that, and we finished, it was like, ‘Ah! You have the thing again.’”