When Louise Burns sings, stars pour out across the sky, a dance of lustre, light and shadow. Shimmering and soulful one minute, gritty and glamorous the next, Young Mopes is Burns at her boldest and brightest — and also her most defiant and dangerous. She’s revelling in her “fuck you” years, exhilarated by the freedom of turning 30, unhinged from expectation and obligation. Burns’ dark pop goth heart, so clearly evident on 2011’s Polaris Prize nominated Mellow Drama and 2013’s Midnight Mass, is just one aspect of Young Mopes’ gleaming kaleidoscope of colours, textures, and influences. “I’d write a set of songs here and another set here and they’d be totally different from each other but that’s who I am,’” Burns says. “I have so many influences — art rock, country, electronic, ambient, folk and straight up pop — I just didn’t want to limit myself and I wanted to make sure I was writing without an agenda and going with whatever was coming to me in the moment.” Young Mopes also represents a few other milestones: this is the first album that Burns recorded with her band, guitarist Darcy Hancock and drummer Ryan Peters, both formerly of Ladyhawk. “It’s also the first time that I decided I would sit in the producer’s seat as well,” Burns says. “I co-piloted the whole thing. It made such a big difference for me because it was more work, but a lot more clarity going into it.” Burns began writing the record in 2014, deciding early on that she would take her time and not rush the process. Midway through, an unexpected fan letter upended everything. Burns was in Hong Kong preparing to fly home to Vancouver after spending a week touring China. Finally able to check Facebook, she logged in and found a note from a distraught fan. It read, “I know you don’t take yourself too seriously, but I do, and I just want you to keep making music because it’s meant a lot to me.” “I spent the next 14 hours flying home, weeping, and thinking about my life and what I’ve done and my whole purpose as an artist.” Eventually Burns arrived at a realization: “I gotta stop dicking around here. This is my record, this is the only thing that matters to me. I’m not going to try to compromise or do that thing people do before they turn 30 and they start writing pop music and it’s a disaster. I just decided to be super honest with myself.” That rawness is complemented by Young Mopes’ evocative sonic landscape — imagine driving all night beneath a full, luminous moon, shadows dancing with an evolving terrain of forests, mountains, valleys, and skyscrapers, chasing dreams until dawn. “And so it goes, you spend your life spinning out of control/ And then you know, you’ve spent your life chasing after a ghost,” Burns sings on the urgent, propulsive, ’80s-influenced album opener, “Who’s the Madman?’” The first single, “Storms,” is a witching hour dance party, full of pulse-racing drums and starlight bouncing betweens synth keys. “Pharoah” is epic and tender, Burns’ lush vocals casting a golden haze over heartbeat drums and a wise and wistful guitar hook. “Strange Weather” turns up the outlaw effects for a country-noir jam that could easily find a place on the continuum between Merle Haggard and Neko Case. Burns’ incredible, soulful cover of Scottish indie pop band Blue Nile’s “Downtown Lights” perfectly captures the fragile hope that flickers inside in the vulnerable, tentative first steps towards love. “Young Mopes,” the album’s title track, is Burns at her most gloriously deadpan. She reclaimed the phrase from a review of her last record in which a critic wrote, “Louise Burns is dead to me,” and categorized her album as music for “young mopes.” “It wasn’t written for him, but I thought ‘young mopes’ was perfect,” Burns laughs. “That’s me and my friends, old souls with teenage hearts.” The last album was dark, she concedes. “I was a mess when I made that record. It’s very obvious I was living in a basement apartment. This record, I wanted to bring bright colour into the darkness that I’ve been feeling for a long time. That goes with turning 30 and being an artist for 20 years and starting to own what you’ve worked for.” And she’s worked incredibly hard: twice nominated for Juno Awards with her first band, the breakout pop group Lillix; a 2014 SOCAN songwriting prize nomination for “Emeralds Shatter”; touring the world, including Japan, China, Europe, and all over North America. “I was going through this obsession with Imposter Syndrome and thinking how much I relate to it, and how much I know everybody else relates to it,” Burns says. “I think it’s a bit of self preservation, because what I’ve learned in 20 years in the music business is this industry is terrible. It’s just awful. There’s nothing good about it. The only good thing about it is what it’s based off of: the music and how it makes people feel. The rest is garbage.” YOUNG MOPES FOREVER.