Review
Genre and Mood
Peter Bjorn and John made Young Folks sound like an afternoon off: indie pop with an indie rock band behind it, playful in its whistled hook and carefree in its loose, hand-played rhythm. Underneath, the mood is more bittersweet than it first seems, because the song is a conversation between two people who are not sure they should be talking at all.
Song Summary
Peter Morén has described the lyric as two jaded people in a bar, cautiously exploring a connection, and the band conceived it as a duet from the start, asking Victoria Bergsman, formerly of The Concretes, to sing the other part. It was recorded on a low budget in Björn Yttling’s studio in Högalid, Stockholm. The melody began as a piano idea Yttling first heard as jazz; he whistled a placeholder for a future instrument, ran it through a tape delay, and the band decided to keep it.
Musical Breakdown
The Beat
John Eriksson plays a minimal beat inspired by Daft Punk’s Robot Rock, and he leaves out the cymbals altogether, because the room’s acoustics did not suit them.
The Percussion
Around the drums the band layered borrowed bongos, the sound of boots on a laminated floor sent through a spring reverb, and glissandos on tubular bells. It is a home-made percussion section, and the room is part of it.
The Whistle
The whistle carries the tune between the vocal lines. When the band found that their first key did not suit Bergsman’s voice, they pitched the whole track up, which is why the whistle sits so high and later became harder to perform live.
The Duet
Morén and Bergsman share the story line by line, so the song plays out as two sides of one hesitant conversation rather than a love song sung in unison.
Concepts in Focus
Young Folks is a textbook case of a hook found by accident. The whistle was never meant to stay, yet Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan singled out its “lazily whistled hook” and AllMusic’s Tim Sendra wrote that the accidental placeholder became essential.
The whistle owes part of its character to a tape delay: each phrase is followed by a soft repeat, which makes a single whistler sound like a call echoing across a park. The footsteps are given space by a spring reverb, so a laminated floor becomes part of the rhythm section.
The music video, directed by Ted Malmros of Shout Out Louds with animation by Graham Samuels, follows animated versions of Peter and Victoria through a park, a bus and a party where everyone seems to disappear. The same rhythm section later carried a very different voice in Controller 7 – Get Ready for the Young Folks, a mashup with the Temptations.
Artistic Context
Morén, Yttling and Eriksson wrote the song together and produced it themselves for their third album, Writer’s Block, released in 2006 on Wichita; Young Folks was its first single.
Impact and Reception
Young Folks was No. 5 on Pitchfork’s Top 100 Tracks of 2006 and No. 2 in NME’s track of the year poll, and it reached No. 13 in the UK on its 2007 re-release, going platinum there and in the US. It soundtracked the pilot of Gossip Girl and a Google Nest ad that asked for “that hipster song with whistling”. Listen once for the whistle, then once for the empty space where the cymbals would be.
