Dave Le’aupepe: an examined life, for the record

Gang of Youths’ singer-songwriter Dave Le’aupepe finds peace through music.

‘Music is the thing that demands the most self-reflection,’ says Gang of Youths singer-songwriter Dave Le’aupepe. Picture: John Feder

Dave Le’aupepe is a big man with a big heart and, some may say, a troubled soul. When he talks it’s with a mix of passion and self-deprecation, but generally he likes to indulge in intelligent banter, informed by a lot of reading, by therapy and by self-examination, something that appears to be his raison d’etre.

“Music is the thing that demands the most self-reflection,” says Le’aupepe, speaking in an office one floor above the Sony studios in Sydney where he and his band Gang of Youths recorded their second album, Go Farther in Lightness, which is released today. “You don’t dream of rock stardom when you’re looking out into the void,” he says. “What I’m looking for is peace, healing, something in life — and this record is therapeutic in that way.”

Just why Le’aupepe should be in need of music therapy can be explained in part by Gang of Youths’ first album, 2015’s The Positions, a bold and blustering rock record that took the Australian music industry by surprise, not least because the subject matter was built largely around his young wife’s cancer, their subsequent divorce and his attempted suicide, all of that accompanied by the singer’s addiction to drugs and alcohol when he was barely out of his teens.

Now 25, Le’aupepe sees Go Farther in Lightness — a title inspired by Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being — as a way of moving on from the first-hand trauma of that first album, while building on the tight-knit group’s energetic and dynamic rock ’n’ roll landscape.

“The difference is that last time I was using real-life tragedy as the source material,” says Le’aupepe. “It was a period of my life when I used the record as a way of expunging all of the things inside me. I was laying it bare. I needed to deal with it. This one is me still dealing with stuff, too, but in the aftermath of all that came before.”

Since forming in Sydney’s inner west five years ago, Gang of Youths have built a reputation as one of Australia’s best live acts, a dynamic five-piece that ignites audiences with a mix of punk energy and musical finesse.

Le’aupepe, guitarist Joji Malani, keyboards player Jung Kim, bassist Maxwell Dunn and drummer Donnie Borzestowski met as members of a local church where the singer learned to play music, before turning his attention towards bands such as Slayer and Sonic Youth.

Gang of Youths’ songs, such as Magnolia, Benevolence Riots, Radioface and the recent single The Deepest Sighs, the Frankest Shadows combine a strong melodic bent with a subtle rock swagger that occasionally explodes into rock ’n’ roll bombast, something that makes their live shows so engaging, in a manner that sits somewhere between Radiohead and the E Street Band.

Driving it all, however, is Le’aupepe’s sweet yet powerful voice and his abundance of lyrics, many of them informed by literature as much as his personal life and inner demons.

The new record, all 16 songs of it, is an intricately woven conceptual canvas as well as being musically rich and diverse. The open­ing song, Fear and Trembling, has all of those elements in its six minutes, beginning as a Springsteen­ian piano ballad before developing into a full-tilt rocker that builds to a breathtaking climax. There’s a lyrical thread running through the album as well, an intellectual exercise by its chief creator.

“I wanted to make something that had a definite arc,” Le’aupepe says. “The Positions had its own narrative, fairly well plotted and thought out, although the music was sporadic and disjointed. I listen back to it and it doesn’t sound as cohesive as I wanted it to be. This one had a story arc from the beginning and its own chronology. The opening song informs every song that comes after it. Each song references the one before it in some way.”

Le’aupepe, who has Samoan roots on his father’s side and Austrian Jewish ones on his mother’s, is a complex individual. His numerous tattoos are reflective of his literary mind, with nods to Greek mythology rubbing shoulders and biceps with more obscure designs.

A man who went straight from school to working numerous jobs to support himself and his wife-to-be, Le’aupepe, who with the rest of the band is now based in London (he flits between there and New York, where his current partner lives), would like to study philosophy or literature or both at university at some point.

“I’m trying to ask questions of myself spiritually and philosophically,” he says, “and trying to become more human and receptive to people. That’s what the record is about. There was something fatalistic about The Positions. I don’t want to sound negative about it, but it was an open-and-shut case. I wanted to ask more existential questions and raise doubts with this one so it feels less open-and-shut to me, more open-ended.”

Certainly there is a sense in Gang of Youths’ music that their story is open-ended, that Le’aupepe and his colleagues could take it in any number of directions over a long period, with the singer constantly exploring, asking big questions of himself and about humanity. He describes his therapist as “someone who changed my life”.

He’s in a better place, too, he says, since the catharsis of The Positions. As his intense conversation attests, he’s someone who is determined to take life by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shake. “Because I will die one day and I don’t want to live without regrets,” he says. “I don’t want to live my life unexplored, unexamined and unenthusiastic.”

The songwriter even has a little bit of philosophy to impart in that regard.

“From 18 to 80 you’re a drunk person stumbling around in the dark looking for a kebab,” he says. “That’s your life. You meander through it trying to figure it out, trying to be the best version of yourself or f..king up prodigiously and having to start over all the time. In life there is never one moment where you feel 100 per cent content. What I’m trying to do is highlight the beauty in that.”

Yet even if he’s happier as his new creation sees the light, Le’aupepe says he is “terrified” about how Go Farther in Lightness will be received, even more than he was for the band’s first album.

“This time more so because I’m not doing drugs or drinking much any more, so there’s nothing to numb all the anxiety about it, nothing to mitigate all my creeping questions about my contribution to the world,” he says.

“There are no distractions this time.”

Go Farther in Lightness is released today through Mosy Recordings/Verge via Sony. Gang of Youths begin their Australian tour in Brisbane on August 31.