“I’ve been wasting my youth on you,” Joshua Bassett sings on his debut studio album, The Golden Years. Much of the 23-year-old Disney actor-singer’s previous releases, including his 2022 EPs Sad Songs in a Hotel Room and Different, consist of lovelorn songs about the sudden end of a romantic entanglement or returning to a relationship that he knows isn’t good for him. He continues to reliably lean on similar themes here.
Bassett peppers The Golden Years with nuggets of wisdom that are wise beyond his years. The album’s title track suggests that we should hold on tight to those we love during our so-called glory days, because we never know how long it might last. The song also poignantly captures that unique period in youth that disappears before we can even greet it properly: “Four years gone by in the blind of an eye/We were young ‘til we weren’t/It was fun ‘til it hurt.”
Rather than experiment more broadly with the subject of growing up and the pressures of being young in Hollywood, Bassett mostly sticks to love songs. But he manages to stand apart from his fellow Disney ex-acts by obliquely speaking to his own personal insecurities. Where tracks like “Little Rita” suggest that Bassett may have made peace with his once-estranged parents, the heart-wrenching ballad “Mirror” reflects a young man who’s still sorting out the wreckage of his past: “Where did it all go wrong?/Innocence stolen way too young,” he sings.
Musically, Bassett is capable of making radio-ready earworms (see “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes”), but he excels when he stays in his comfort zone of softly strummed acoustic songs like “Don’t Let Me Down,” featuring up-and-comer Jenna Raine. Rather than commission highly sought-after hitmakers to collaborate with, Bassett takes heed of his own advice, maintaining a slower and steadier pace than his peers and living in the moment.
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