Young the Giant releases Victory Garden, launches 2026 tour with Cold War Kids

Young the Giant is back with Victory Garden, and the timing sharpens the contrast between memory and momentum. The band’s 2014 song “Mind Over Matter” still lands with the same wide-open ache in performance, while the group launches a 2026 tour that starts Saturday in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with Cold War Kids and almost monday.

The Irvine, California band formed in 2004 and built its national profile on early-2010s songs like “My Body” and “Cough Syrup,” two tracks that have more than 400 million streams on Spotify. The lineup remains Sameer Gadhia on lead vocals, Jacob Tilley on guitar, Eric Cannata on guitar, Payam Doostzadeh on bass guitar and François Comtois on drums. “Mind Over Matter,” the group’s second studio album, arrived on January 21, 2014, and “Cough Syrup” is listed on Spotify as a 2011 song, a reminder of how long the band’s catalog has circulated in digital playlists and radio memory.

Victory Garden, released May 1, is Young the Giant’s first full-length record since 2022’s American Bollywood. The band has described the project in a press-release blurb as an ode to “radical empathy,” shaped by seeing the world through the eyes of their young children. The 11-song track list stretches from “Evergreen” and “Different Kind Of Love” to “Bitter Fruit,” “Already There,” “Ships Passing,” “This Too Shall Pass,” “Mona Lisa,” “God As Witness,” “Are You With Me?,” “The Garden” and “Life Is A Long Goodbye.”

The new album and the old breakthrough now sit side by side in Young the Giant’s public identity. For a generation that met the band through the glossy surge of “Cough Syrup” and the towering sweep of “Mind Over Matter,” the group’s staying power comes from that same balance of emotional directness and big-room scale. The 2026 tour, which begins at Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater in Bridgeport, gives Young the Giant another chance to test that formula live, with Cold War Kids and almost monday alongside them as the band moves further past its breakout years without losing the songs that made listeners stay.