NEIL YOUNG & THE CHROME HEARTS : SECOND SONG

NEIL YOUNG & THE CHROME HEARTS : SECOND SONG

The Foggy Edge Of Time
Day After Day
Earth Girl
Second Song
Casting Me Away From You
Soon I Might Be Going
I'll Love You Forever

Label : Reprise Records

Length : 42:15

Release Date : September 18, 2026
Review (Pitchfork) : Second Song is an act of hypnosis. For all of Neil Young’s enduring and endlessly regenerative influence, that power is what nobody can touch. Imitate his moody, mewing Canadian whine; adopt his verité approach to studio recording; tune your acoustic guitar to drop-D and overdrive your electric through a vintage amp; rip a solo that’s just one note and dig into the fretboard as if a weaker player handed you their instrument to help wear in the neck. But who else can conjure this kind of grainy, autumnal dream state with such effortlessness and patience, using such spare tools? For the first time since 2012’s louder and gnarlier Psychedelic Pill, Young spends his 50th studio album luxuriating in this gift, casting a glow of bittersweet contentment that feels distinct in his catalog. You could be forgiven for keeping your expectations low. These days, the 80-year-old songwriter’s attention seems largely dominated by his Archives project—the type of comprehensive legacy curation that tends to be handed off entirely to the label but which Young has continued to operate in a charmingly messy state of constant, unpredictable motion. Along the way, his new records, more than ever, seem to exist mainly to document passing obsessions, feelings, and company. From a trio of understated Crazy Horse reunion records between 2019 and 2022 to last year’s wispy and unsteady Talkin to the Trees—the debut of his new backing band, the Chrome Hearts—these statements are always welcome but rarely essential. Upon entering the studio earlier this year, even Young wasn’t sure about his latest crop of material, confessing to Archives subscribers that he “ran out of tunes fast.” Really, he just had five songs—and “songs” might even be stretching it. These were slow, formless meditations, several hovering around the 10-minute mark, ambling along to breezy, familiar chord changes on acoustic guitar and piano. The title track felt like a stretched-out jam on the ascending progression from his eternal “Harvest Moon”; another sounded a little like Mazzy Starr’s “Fade Into You.” And so, Young padded out the record with new renditions of “Casting Me Away From You” and “I’ll Love You Forever,” two early rarities that had yet to appear on a studio album (although both appeared on 2009’s Archives Vol. 1 box set). Together, they lighten up the B-side of the record with sweet, Beatlesque love songs: nascent tunes written by a young singer-songwriter in the mid ’60s, finding his voice in a crowded industry. Here, they serve a different purpose. For one thing, they are reminders of the melodic dexterity that once defined Young’s songwriting but has since been replaced with a first-thought-best-thought folk simplicity. (Two tracks on Talkin to the Trees borrowed the melody from “This Land Is Your Land.”) There’s another thing that’s hard to replicate: While “Casting Me Away From You” might feel like a pop standard, notice the way the rhythm shifts briefly, allowing the turn of “Now I find/You’re leaving me behind” to form its own mini-refrain within the chorus. On Talkin to the Trees, you got the sense the Chrome Hearts were hearing the songs for the first time as Neil counted off; now, you can sense his bandmates listening, cautiously finding their way and navigating each turn with a fragility that suits the material. So, too, does Young’s voice. The music on Second Songs seems built to spotlight the weathered yelps of his falsetto, frayed at the edges and finally showing his age after a lifetime of sounding wise beyond his years. The record I think of most upon listening is 1994’s Sleeps With Angels, which carved a haunted middle ground between the unruly jams of Ragged Glory and the twilight balladry of Harvest Moon. Like that record, this one is more notable for sustaining an atmosphere than contributing any individual staples to his songbook. “Day After Day,” the song that resembles “Fade Into You,” is gorgeous and wistful, delivered with a steady insistence that feels as intense as any of Young’s heavier epics. But now the goal is eliciting a sense of quiet focus: “There’s something I want to say and say it slow,” he tells us. “I’m a little scared of it... so here it goes.” It’s hard to imagine what Young, at this stage in his career, may be intimidated to reveal—especially considering, just an album ago, he was unloading family drama with uncomfortable specifics about his estranged daughter. This time, he assumes a more generous perspective. My favorite lyric arrives in the nine-minute “Soon I Might Be Going.” As if floating past a timeline that begins with those once-abandoned songs from the ’60s, he speeds up to the present day, as he watches the news in disbelief (“He’s tearing down the old White House…”) and assesses concerning changes in the weather and environment. Then, he turns his attention back to his daughter: “I miss you like tomorrow,” he sings. “And I see you like today.” Such a simple idea, but no other songwriter could make it mean so much. With the foghorning drone of a distorted electric guitar beneath his acoustic strumming, Young seems to condense his worldview, his creative process, and his anxieties into these fleeting words. Here is the promise that has kept him running all these years: a new day, another batch of songs, some more perspective on the miles he’s traveled. As he comes to grips with a finite amount of tomorrows, he’s helping to prolong the beauty and meaning of today.

Review (Mojo Magazine) : At the start of 2026, MOJO enlisted the help of our readers to compile a guide to the best new Neil Young albums of the 21st century. It had proved, thus far, a hectic and complicated 26 years: by our count there had been 20 studio albums, six live albums, two memoirs, approximately 30 Archives releases, at least seven movies, innumerable tours, a revolutionary car and a Toblerone-shaped rival to the iPod. Young’s 21st new album of the 21st Century, however, is strong evidence that the Top 10 we constructed needs revision. Second Song is comfortably his best since the molten sprawl of 2012’s Psychedelic Pill, the last hurrah of Poncho Sampedro-era Crazy Horse. And while Young’s current backing band, The Chrome Hearts, can channel the Horse’s monolithic stomp, it is their grace and sensitivity – their Stray Gators acoustic sway - that comes to the fore on this late-period classic. Young’s 21st new album of the 21st Century, however, is strong evidence that the Top 10 we constructed needs revision. Second Song is comfortably his best since the molten sprawl of 2012’s Psychedelic Pill, the last hurrah of Poncho Sampedro-era Crazy Horse. And while Young’s current backing band, The Chrome Hearts, can channel the Horse’s monolithic stomp, it is their grace and sensitivity – their Stray Gators acoustic sway - that comes to the fore on this late-period classic. It’s a song of memory, of old ways, but not one that’s exactly predicated on melancholy defeat. “Too much has changed around us,” Young sings, beautifully, between bursts of harmonica, as drummer Anthony LoGerfo keeps up a measured swing, “but we can bring it back somehow.” “I disassociate it from the time frame,” Young tells Grayson, and that feels like a critical theme of the record itself – one where old memories and songs, old and young collaborators, become blurred and interdependent, collapsing in on one another in Neil’s autonomous zone. I’ll Love You Forever was first recorded by Young in 1964 with his teenage band, The Squires, and if you listen to the original on the first Archives boxset, it sounds like an enchanted bit of adolescent twang; a lonesome surf ballad to a first love. Revisited 62 eventful years later, however, the lyrics have a new resonance – a paean to the miracles of finding a soulmate later in life, in the shape of Daryl Hannah – and the music has matured into a cosily evocative echo of Harvest Moon. There’s nothing unusual about Young digging out and re-recording lost songs from his vaults, of course, but going as far back as the time before Buffalo Springfield is new, and a neat way of showcasing the robust consistency of his songcraft that was there from the start. Casting Me Away From You originally dates from 1965, and manifested on Archives Volume 1 as a clean-cut folk revival strummer with his friend Comrie Smith. Now, in the hands of The Chrome Hearts it’s fuller-blooded, knockabout country; a wholly successful resurrection. The best songs, though, are three new burners: the title track, Day After Day and Soon I Might Be Going. Day After Day has that off-the cuff air of many latterday Young songs, as if he’s articulating every random passing thought. This time, though, the overall effect is more cohesive than whimsical, a flowing evocation of ongoing personal contentment. “Now the sun is out and the snow’s melting on the roof,” he sings. “I hear the water drops falling so the day is here/ You’ll be coming down the stairs and I’ll make a special cup for you.” The artlessness is touching, the improvising delicacy of the Chrome Hearts perfectly attuned as it rolls on; a Colorado reverie, with echoes of Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, that’s stronger than some of Young’s other freeform paeans to Hannah in recent years. Soon I Might Be Going, meanwhile, rides in on stunned electric powerchords, a masterpiece of how internal and external weather, the personal and political, nature and mortality, become entangled in ever more profound and perhaps confounding ways. It’s an open letter of a kind, possibly addressed to his daughter Amber Jean (their relationship the focus of the more upsetting Dark Mirage, from 2025’s Talkin’ To The Trees), that also finds room for a sorrowful allusion to Donald Trump “tearing down the old White House”. The mood is valedictory, the feedback shade and Oldham’s organ adding a fraught undertow to the strikingly lovely lilt of it all. But even here, there’s a recognition of the temporal nature of things, the possibility of change and “waiting for a song”: for better or worse, all these things shall pass.

Review (The Guardian) : You can’t fault Neil Young for his industry. Second Song is his second new album of 2026: the first, a double live set called As Time Explodes, was released just over three months ago. Indeed, at 80, his work schedule seems mind-boggling. Since 2020, he’s released nine new albums, a 30-minute EP, five self-directed films and three more films directed by others, 10 archival live albums, six archival studio albums and two immense box sets. He has embarked on tours with his longstanding backing band Crazy Horse, his recently convened backing band the Chrome Hearts, and solo. He has gone to public war with Spotify, Amazon, Ticketmaster and – briefly – the BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury, and penned umpteen op-ed pieces about politics, the environment and corporate media for his online newspaper the Times-Contrarian. When he recently cancelled a European tour citing exhaustion, it was hard not to think: well, I’m not surprised. You do find yourself wondering if his workload is such a good thing: not just for an elderly gentleman’s health but also for the quality of his output. Young has always prized spontaneity over finesse, but some of his more recent releases have suggested that at least a soupçon of finesse might not go amiss. Last year’s Talkin to the Trees, however, seemed to cross the line that separates the instinctive from the dashed off. Young frequently sounded as if he was making the material up as he went along, with nugatory results: “When today has come and gone, I might be singing my new song,” he offered on Family Life. “Might be short, it might be long, but I’ll be singing my new song.” If some of the melodies sounded familiar, that’s because they were. Not one but two tracks echoed the tune of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land; First Fire of Winter was essentially Young’s 1970 masterpiece Helpless with different lyrics; Thankful rewrote 1992’s Harvest Moon. Its follow-up leans more into Young’s gentle acoustic side than the gargantuan Crazy Horse-like din the Chrome Hearts are more than capable of creating. The music seems a little more honed than that on its predecessor. There are audible overdubs, including a backwards guitar solo on opener The Foggy Edge of Time. Like 1973’s Don’t Be Denied or 1979’s Thrasher, it’s one of those Neil Young songs in which he defends his right to follow his muse, regardless of the personal cost. But if you’re worried about declining inspiration, the omens augur ill. Two of Second Song’s seven tracks are re-recordings of tracks Young first performed with his early 60s band the Squires, which hardly suggests a surfeit of great new material. Casting Me Away From You and I’ll Love You Forever turn out to be pleasant enough, but slight. The former has already been plundered for its melody on The Emperor of Wyoming, from Young’s eponymous 1968 solo debut; I’ll Love You Forever, reworked as a paean to Young’s partner Daryl Hannah, is at least more charming than the tribute he offered up on Talkin to the Trees, which described Hannah as “my best wife ever” and “the best cook in the world”. Elsewhere, there’s another song cut from the same rambling cloth as the stuff on Second Song’s predecessor – Day After Day’s seven minutes feel like seven months – and an unexpected, but sweet diversion into pre-rock’n’roll pop on Earth Girl. That leaves two songs, although in fairness, they take up nearly half Second Song’s running time. From its title downwards, Soon I Might Be Going is thick with intimations of imminent mortality – “I miss you like tomorrow”, Young sings at one point – and feels like a weary, far older cousin of 1974’s Ambulance Blues: a long, ruminative sigh of a song whose subject matter ranges wildly about, from Donald Trump’s White House renovations to Young’s estrangement from his daughter Amber Jean. He also addressed the latter on Talkin to the Trees, but while the tone there was huffy and injured, here Young sounds plaintive and bereft: “Come back to me, my lovely girl, your memory is mine.”

Review (AllMusic) : Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts wasted no time after springing into existence in late 2024. By then, Young was over 60 years into one of the most important runs in rock & roll history, and had played with many a backing band, including ones that shared members with the newly minted Chrome Hearts. Still, there’s a distinctive spark to Young’s work with the Chrome Hearts, and how driven he’s been to make new work with them. Second Song arrives one year after not just the group’s first studio album together (2025’s grungy Talkin to the Trees) but also a lengthy tour and a live document of it, 2026’s burning concert album As Time Explodes. Second Song is a mellower accompaniment to the rocking sounds that preceded it, tending toward acoustic instrumentation and laid-back performances. The fully analog recording process of the album fits this soft and easy style. The familiar chord progression and gentle vocal harmonies of the meandering “Day After Day” recall the reflective beauty of earlier Young tunes like “Helpless” and add new texture with droning pump organ and twinkly piano. The 11-minute title track is similar, a slow walk through simple instrumentation and Young’s warmly creaking vocals playing with variations on melodies he may have used in slightly different forms in the past. Firmly in the same folksy mode as Harvest, Comes a Time, and other of Young's more subdued albums, the peppy country-rock shuffle of “Casting Me Away” is as upbeat as Second Song gets, burying even its slick guitar leads and drums far beneath Young’s harmonica riffs and lovelorn singing. Even the flashes of loud distorted guitar that show up in “Soon I Might Be Going” are couched in a drifting and dreamy cycle that vamps on for the song’s nine-minute runtime. There are tonal similarities between the way these songs play out and the thoughtful journey that 1974’s On the Beach took listeners on (or to a much lesser degree, like a more succinct and soft-spoken distant cousin of the heavy and drawn-out meditations of 2012’s Psychedelic Pill), with Young allowing himself to ramble a bit and then tie up loose ends with shorter tunes. It’s an especially dialed-down reading of a side of Neil that listeners are well acquainted with from how it’s played out in previous iterations over the years. The Chrome Hearts adapt perfectly into their role as an understated backing band, and Young presents some new reflections, some wandering thoughts, some beautifully tender moments, and a few welcome references to older versions of himself.

Review (13th Floor) : With Crazy Horse put out to pasture, Neil Young continues to spend his musical golden years with The Chrome Hearts and their Second Song is a big improvement over their first. For those keeping score at home, The Chrome Hearts are: Micah Nelson (Willie’s son) on guitar and various stringed instruments, Spooner Oldham (the 82-year-old Muscle Shoals veteran) on keys along with a rhythm section of drummer Anthony LoGerfo and Cory McCormick on bass. And co-producing is 92-year-old Lou Adler along with longtime Young co-hort Niko Bolas. I mention the ages of Oldham and Adler because the passage of time is clearly on the mind of the 80-year-old Neil Young, and like many his age, he’s taking time to reflect. “I thought about the early days, when I was young and found that place. Three beautiful children born and raised, but there were bumps along the way”, old Shakey sings on the opening track, The Foggy Edge Of Time. But these days its seems those bumps have smoothed out as he’s shacked up with Daryl Hannah and living in the Rockies. One gets the feeling that Neil’s domestic bliss is the driving force behind Second Song, rather than his advancing years. Songs like Earth Girl and I’ll Love You Forever are clearly inspired by his current wife, even though the former tune was written back in 1964. Two of the seven songs here are revived from the archives, but they all hang together as a piece. Musically, the vibe is easygoing, effortless and spontaneous. It’s more Harvest than Hurricane but Neil does plug in on the 9-minute Soon I Might Be Going, the one song where he veers from the personal to the political. “President was on TV, says everything is golden, he’s tearing down the old White House, those days were never olden. The bears are trying to hibernate but can’t find where to go. ‘Cause everything is different now just like a TV show. We have to take it as it comes, as some are like to say, but you know, and it seems to me, that’s not what’s right today.” But even here, Neil sounds resigned to the way things are, and, like the rest of us, is doing his best to keep his head together…it’s a long way from Ohio. It’s also a long way from the disaster that was last year’s, Talkin’ To The Trees. Where Neil and the crew sounded tired and cliched, here they sound warm and fuzzy. Second Song isn’t going to change the world, or your opinion of Neil Young, but for longtime fans like me, it will but a smile on your face and a spring in your step.