July 8, 2022
Reprise Records
2xLP
Recorded in 2001 in San Francisco’s Toast Studios and unreleased until now because it was deemed by Neil Young to be “so sad I couldn’t put it out”, Toast is Young’s latest dive into his own seemingly bottomless archive of lost albums. True to Young’s reasoning for shelving it, Toast is a dour affair that deals with the unraveling of his marriage to Pegi Young, who lends backing vocals throughout the album, over a decade before the marriage ultimately ended in the mid-2010s. Despite the darker subject matter, the music is in swaggering form as Crazy Horse harnesses the arena-sized rock of past classics like Ragged Glory and Rust Never Sleeps to make for something that you could sing along to at a show and then cry yourself to sleep afterwards once you’ve thought about what the lyrics mean.