This is a 21+ event w/ valid ID at Soda Bar - San Diego. Warmer Than Gold, the new album from Ben Cook’s project GUV, is a document of a life in music, a critical and celebratory travelogue, an attempt to transcend the homogeneous and status-obsessed conditions of the contemporary world through the use of big beats, big choruses, and distortion. It’s a record made on the go that makes sense anywhere. And most of all, with its expanded sonic palette and emphasis on breakbeats, it ushers in the newest era of an artist who has never stopped growing.  Cook, who grew up moving between Toronto and England, boasts anglo bonafides that separate him from the growing pack of hardcore kids sporting windbreakers and bowl cuts. “My grandmother helped invent the miniskirt in London in the 60's, my parents met in a squat in Brixton. My dad was the drug dealer, my mom the hippie runaway,” Cook explains. “Growing up, I had a little bit of a Bristol life, it was more like trip-hop and reggae vibes over there when I was young.” Two of the first shows he attended, at the age of 12, were Oasis and Neil Young. After the show, he remembers thinking, “Yeah, I'm gonna do music forever.” Not long after he discovered hardcore and punk, and it was off to the races, first with his beloved hardcore band, No Warning (who he continues to play with to this day), then as a member of punk experimentalists, Fucked Up, from 2007 to 2021–and all the while building a deep and impressive catalog of solo work first as Young Governor, then Young Guv, and now simply, GUV (“I'm not so young anymore, three letter band names are cool, and I'm tired of being mistaken for a rapper,” Cook notes).  Warmer Than Gold is the widescreen culmination of all of these threads. The album’s music retains the hooky spirit of Cook’s previous records, like the acclaimed double albums GUVI & II and GUV III & IV, but it adds a decidedly rhythmic element informed by classic Madchester and Britpop. It smears and soars, it feels like bolting down the M1 Motorway at midnight, propelled by an urgency unseen in Cook’s other work. What is retained from those earlier power pop releases, though, is the artist’s sharp ear for hooks; now combined with a recharged production sensibility inspired by everyone from the Beastie Boys to The Field Mice to Primal Scream, Cook is able to musically support the core lyrical themes that run throughout the project: the global flattening of culture, the passage of time in the material world, and the artist’s role within all of it.  Cook deploys his musical language as a vehicle to talk about the cultural erosion of the cities he has been moving through for decades. “Warmer Than Gold is about slipping through two worlds. One ruled by luxury and the worship of status, and another that feels like an escape, a dream you can almost touch,” Cook explains. “It’s about buses, trains, planes, about big dreams in solitude, finding something real despite everything trying to erase it. It’s about London, my family, everyone I’ve ever and never met. It’s the feeling of infinite movement, the glow of yellow moons over dark oceans, the weight of history pressing against the future.”  It all makes for an album that’s critical of the systems Cook observes but triumphant in its musical sweep. At under 45 minutes, Warmer Than Gold’s running time is less sprawling than some of GUV’s previous collections of music, but it compacts a lot of energy into a tight container. Defined by a feeling of unstoppable motion, the songs hit like time-elapsed shots of a busy urban intersection at night. The record was made between multiple locations in multiple continents, and when Cook isn’t on the road with any of his projects, he stays on the road as a tour manager. "The music world is unstable, but I find comfort in the bubble it creates,” Cook says. At its core, Warmer Than Gold is also a musical conversation between two old friends. The story starts last year in Portugal. That’s where Cook, who had taken a few years off from making music, met up with his friend and collaborator in No Warning, James Matthew Seven, to try out something new. Those sessions yielded more play than work, but they did seed a body of music that would begin to come together when the two were geographically distant from each other. “He is someone that just really sits at home all day and lives in his own world and makes music,” Cook says, of Seven, who makes music under the name JMVII. “"He clocked I was in London. I’m out in the streets, taking it all in, riding the bus, posted in the pub, soaking up the city and what it has to offer. I’d walk around and think of my family and what their lives must have been like,” Cook says. It was this knowledge of Cook’s movement through London that inspired Seven to start cooking up a series of breakbeat-driven tracks that drew from the uptempo frenzy of turn-of-the-90s British rave and rock music. “He was like, Here's a soundtrack to what you just did yesterday,” Cook says.  Armed with some banging instrumentals and a lot of free time to move through London, Cook began sculpting the lyrics and melodies that would begin to flesh out Warmer Than Gold. Everything came together fast. The second half of the record was made in Los Angeles where Cook and Seven built on the spontaneity of the music they’d made in London. Though Cook often works in a painstakingly precise way, Warmer Than Gold was made with a one-take spirit. “Usually I demo things very particularly,” Cook says. “And that's not the case with this one, everything was cooked on the spot with the team I’ve worked so closely with for so long. There was a lot more trust and flow in the process of making this album.” By the time the album was completed, Cook and JMVII had assembled an all-star cast of creatives including recording/production from the likes of Tony Price, Noah Kohll, Max Epstein (aka Photographic Memory), Darcy Baylis, Jimmy Dixon, Johnny Bell, Joey Oaxaca, Walter Sedriks, and Remghost; as well as performance contributions from Hatchie, Meg Mills of Turnstile, and many more.  The result is an album that feels alive and communal yet completely cohesive and driven by Cook’s vision. Opener “Let Your Hands Go” is a stadium-sized rave rock belter, propelled by breaks, a big hook, and a sneaky acid bassline. On the title track Cook sings lines like “I walk through a town of love and beauty, but now in ruin like a broken heart” and “Paper dreams yeah they all turn cold / Lookin’ for something warmer than gold,” introducing many of the record’s themes over a windswept groove equally suited for sunsets in pre-billionaire takeover Ibiza or a hazy walk from the punk house to the third wave coffee shop. “Blue Jade” drives hard like early Jesus And Mary Chain doing the Poznan, while elsewhere “Chasin Luv” is a cut of timeless sounding indie pop that fuses C86 charm with the shimmer of first wave shoegaze. And through all the sonic twists and turns Cook’s talent for hooks and heart is on full display, whether it’s the shimmering dream pop of Hatchie duet “Never Should Have Said,” the bleary-eyed baggy of “Crash Down Feeling” or the Sarah Records-inspired chime of “Seaside Story,” co-written with Meg Mills of Turnstile. Cook’s absence from music afforded him time to reflect on both his own musical history and the inputs that color his world; he’s come out of this hiatus energized and bearing a bag of major tunes. "I’ve tried to open up to the world and let it speak back to me. Slowly, I’ve been rediscovering myself, and now gratefully back to releasing music,” Cook says. “In the end, I’ve been searching for ways to bring the fleeting into focus, to make the invisible parts of myself real, hoping they might connect with something greater. Warmer Than Gold is another step in that journey of rediscovery.” Presented by Soda. This is a 21+ event