''Savage Hills Ballroom'' is the third and final studio album by

Boise, Idaho Boise (, , ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Idaho and is the county seat of Ada County. On the Boise River in southwestern Idaho, it is east of the Oregon border and north of the Nevada border. The downtown are ...

-based musician Trevor Powers'

Youth Lagoon Trevor Powers (born March 18, 1989) is an American musician from Boise, Idaho. Powers was initially active as Youth Lagoon from 2010 to 2016, after which he announced he was retiring the project. He returned to music with a new self-titled projec ...

project. The album was recorded in

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, England, and released on September 25, 2015 by

Fat Possum Records Fat Possum Records is an American independent record label based in Water Valley and Oxford, Mississippi. At first Fat Possum focused almost entirely on recording previously unknown Mississippi blues artists (typically from Oxford or Holly Sprin ...

Background

Powers alluded to the fact that the album addressed breaking down barriers and acknowledging personal flaws. He stated in an interview that the album was not named for an actual ballroom: “It’s a mystical place. I think of things in mental images, and while I was working on the album, I pictured this allroom��a place that’s ominous but still inviting. And I needed an appropriate name for that, and ‘Savage Hills Ballroom’ fit," he said.

Release

On July 13, 2015, "The Knower" became the first track to be distributed prior to the album's release; it was issued as a free single-sided 7" single. "Highway Patrol Stun Gun" was subsequently released on August 10 as a

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Critical reception

''Savage Hills Ballroom'' received mostly positive reviews from contemporary music critics. At

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an

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score of 74, based on 10 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". Ian Cohen of

Pitchfork Media ''Pitchfork'' (formerly ''Pitchfork Media'') is an American online music publication (currently owned by Condé Nast) that was launched in 1995 by writer Ryan Schreiber as an independent music blog. Schreiber started Pitchfork while working ...

gave the album a positive review, stating, "Regardless of the subject matter or the production or the arrangements, the most truly self-searching Youth Lagoon album has Powers realizing he perhaps knew his position of strength all along—the inner child set adrift in the adult world, left to figure it out on his own."

Track listing

References

{{Authority control Youth Lagoon albums 2015 albums Fat Possum Records albums