Following the release of their debut, The Haunted Youth return with details of their 2nd studio album, Boys Cry Too, set to drop on 8th May 2026. Beginning as the solo project of artist Joachim Liebens, the band today reveal the first single to be lifted from the record, ‘deathwish’, featuring fellow collaborator and Orlando-based singer-songwriter, Max Fry.

Check out the official video for ‘deathwish’ here

On Boys Cry Too, Joachim Liebens abandons the fragile, bedroom-pop innocence of Dawn Of The Freak - a debut that has since earned cult status back home - in favour of something far more confrontational and emotionally charged. From the towering eight-minute opener ‘in my head’ to the closing track ‘ghost girl’, the album lets go of restraint in favour of something more raw, blending fragile melodies with distortion and aggression to create a sound that feels both intimate and explosive.

“I was a kid on Dawn Of The Freak,” reflects Liebens today. “It sounds almost like nursery rhymes to me – everything is so fragile and childlike, like a cry for attention.” He pauses before breaking into a wide, Cheshire Cat grin. “And now I’m angsty and kicking in doors.”

Boys Cry Too certainly feels like a more fiery and red-blooded record than Dawn Of The Freak. While you can lose yourself in ‘wake up’s icy morning-after-the-night-before regret, or the propulsive optimism of the New Order-like ‘i hear voices’, the mood is frequently one of anguish and aggression. Take ‘murder me’’s goth grunge thrash, or the ground zero annihilation represented in instrumental epic ‘falling to pieces’.

“I very much felt like a boy on this record. The last album was more androgynous in that respect, but this time I was really in touch with the male side of my emotions,” explains Liebens. “The first half of the record is basically how everyone sees a boy when he’s heartbroken: he puts his walls up, he’s paranoid, he’s angry, he’s aggressive. But then the second half is this whole other story – it’s vulnerable,” he continues. “I want to show the vulnerable part of men and boys and celebrate it instead of making it this whole stigma that’s been going on for so long.”

It’s a wide emotional spectrum reflected in a change of instrumentation for Boys Cry Too, with live drums and guitar coming more into focus ahead of the layers of sun-bleached synths that characterised Dawn Of The Freak. The shadowy ‘castlevania’, for instance, is described by Liebens as “the perfect triangle of Nirvana, Alice In Chains and My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.”

Yet despite its squalls of guitar noise, Liebens says he was largely listening to hip hop artists during the record’s competition, citing emo-rap outlier Lil Peep as a key influence as he crafted his own set of lyrical signifiers. “The lyrics in a lot of non-hip hop music try to bring resolution, but it’s so much more powerful to have these lines that people just instantly engage with,” he notes.

For all the killer lyrics on the record that grab you by the scruff of the neck, it was crucial for Liebens to leave space in his writing for the listener to impart their own experience into the songs. Boys Cry Too may have been born from his own pain, but he wants it to resonate with other people’s lives.

The new record is fuelled by emotional turmoil, something evident in the self-destructive roar on first single, ‘deathwish’. Some of what is verbalised on this track might feel incredibly raw to the listener, but for Liebens, it was important to be honest to the emotion behind the song, as he half-jokingly refers to the album as his “80s coming of age punk rock movie”.

1. in my head
2. castlevania
3. deathwish
4. emo song
5. wake up
6. hurt
7. murder me
8. falling to pieces
9. i hear voices
10. forget me
11. ghost girl