Bobbie Allen grabs a framed movie poster off the wall and holds it up to the camera. It’s from Halloween, with Michael Myers standing at the top of a staircase and a tagline that reads, “The trick is to stay alive.” In the lower left-hand corner is a silver-Sharpie doodle. “The Shape signed it for me!” she exclaims, referring to Nick Castle, the actor behind the mask. “I went to this horror convention near the airport, and I turned around and there he was.”
Bobbie is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter who makes sharp, brooding, slightly twisted pop under the name Young Summer. She is a horror nerd, peppering her conversation with references and recommendations: “Have you seen Butterfly Kisses?” “What did you think of Deep House?” She favors a creepy vibe over excessive gore and CGI. “We have an independent movie theater here in Nashville called the Belcourt, and they played The Thing back in January. I finally got to see my favorite movie on the big screen. When the dog’s head splits open, it was just so joyful.”
In a roundabout way, she says, horror informs her new, self-titled album as Young Summer, released in late 2023 with a deluxe edition coming this fall.
She writes songs about desire blurring into obsession, about emotions pushed to extremes, about apocalypses big and small, and she soundtracks them with burbling, brooding pop arrangements that are less deep goth and more like Beach House as if they’d played the Bang Bang Bar in Twin Peaks: The Return. Death in many forms looms over the songs, whether it’s the self-annihilation of giving yourself to a lover (“You Make Dying Fun”) or the actual end of the world (“If the World Falls to Pieces”).
“One of the questions I asked myself as I was writing these songs was, ‘Do I hear something visual?’” “Make Waves” was inspired, she says, by Creature From the Black Lagoon. “There’s a part that we filter over so that it sounds like you’re underwater. I like small moments like that. I like how they can build on each other. I wanted you to be able to close your eyes and see the story playing out cinematically.”
Her Young Summer debut, Siren, came out in 2014, shortly after moving from Washington, D.C. That album devised a unique blend of layered synths and live instrumentation that rejected anything resembling twang—although she has since co-written with folks connected to country and Americana, including Madi Diaz, Natalie Hemby, and Ruston Kelly.
Bobbie and co-producer Konrad Snyder finished Young Summer in March 2020. “During the pandemic it was too painful to listen to music, because I didn’t know if I would ever make music again. I didn’t even know if this record would get a release.”
Eventually she signed a record deal and released Young Summer to rave reviews, including as one of SPIN’s Albums of the Year. She became her own Jamie Lee Curtis, her own final girl. “With this album I learned to refuse to abandon hope. There’s no utility in that. Everybody’s been through the wringer the last few years, but I decided I had to hang on to this little bit of joy. That felt like a rebellion.”