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The title track of Charly Bliss’s new album Young Enough is a rearview mirror-ready masterpiece

I am quite literally diving to drown in this song.

May 16, 2019

Last Friday, after months of teasing with stellar singles like "Capacity" and "Hard To Believe," Charly Bliss released their sophomore LP, Young Enough. The record bursts with frenetic energy from the get-go — the opener is quite literally titled "Blown To Bits." But exactly halfway through the album, the Brooklyn-via-Connecticut band slow the pulse and deliver their most colossal statement yet on the title track.

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Built on the foundation of one persistent chord, "Young Enough" hones its gaze on the exquisite pain of a first love, one with the capacity to awaken dormant teenage angst: "We're young enough to believe it should hurt this much." Wavering through now and then, there's a sharp awareness to the naivety Charly Bliss present in the track, one that’s strengthened through repetition.

Frontwoman Eva Hendricks has stated that, while most of the album's lyrics were penned in the wake of an abusive relationship, "Young Enough" was written about someone else: "It’s about feeling grateful that someone tried to love you as best they could, and simultaneously feeling even more grateful that you don’t buy into that anymore and you’ve made it out the other side."

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It's only from that "other side" that anyone can begin to comprehend the real power of adolescent hedonism, and it's from this perspective that Charly Bliss cut to the primal without deploying cheap nostalgia. "You were still just a kid, you're a beautiful boy, crushing cigarettes just to prove a point," Hendricks sings, distancing herself from what she's outgrown with each repetition.

"Young Enough" is youth encased in titanium. It's fist-pumping out the car window to an old LCD Soundsystem song, it's a supercut of the way your exes looked when they smiled, it's feeling like John Hughes read your journal and cast the Brat Pack in its movie adaptation. But above all that, "Young Enough" is cognizant enough to recognize that the real force behind these kinds of rushes only reveals itself after they're gone.