21-year-old Mikkel Holm Silkjær named his first band for a Big Lebowski reference, which gives a sense of the kind of left-field humor and existential darkness that inhabits his particular breed of melody-driven punk. Yung is not Silkjær’s first band, but it’s the one where he put all the songs that didn’t fit anywhere else, the ones that felt too self-driven to try out in a group setting. Raised by two music obsessives, his initial impulse was to avoid music all together. That adolescent rebellion lasted until he was about 16 and then quickly melted away, re-emerging as an insistent, hooky, and bright strain of punk rock.

For the last five years or so, Silkjær has been writing and recording songs at home as Yung. No one else even knew about his growing body of work until Silkjær’s dad stumbled upon the songs after borrowing his son’s laptop during an auspicious trip to New York City. About two years ago, Yung transitioned from studio project to live band, and Silkjær was joined by Frederik Nybo Veile on drums, Tobias Guldborg Tarp on bass, and Emil Zethsen on additional guitar. But the songs remain decidedly Silkjær’s, and he sings them with the kind of possessive urgency shared by great punk songs of any identity.

After releasing a few limited-release EPs in their native Denmark, Yung headed out on tour and began to gain international attention for their incessantly catchy, furious, and melodic punk. Their debut full-length, Falter, came out in Denmark, and a truncated version of it was released earlier this year as the Alter EP. Now, they’re releasing a collection of songs that Silkjær wrote after their initial foray into touring, a six-song EP called These Thoughts Are Like Mandatory Chores, which came out last September 2015. A full length record titled A Youthful Dream was released on June 10, 2016. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.