Start your new year with a sense of wonder

Name: Young Wonder (aka Ian Ring and Rachel Koeman)

Where they’re from From: Cork, Ireland

When they Started: 2011

Genre: Electro-pop

Most Similar: Passion Pit, Naked & Famous, Born Gold

Sounds Like: Rebirth!

Young Wonder’s “To You” may have dropped several months ago, garnering love from UK radio and Hype Machine charts in the meantime (it hit #1 a few weeks ago), but it’s the perfect song to ring in a new year. 2012 was terminally shitty, but there’s something about the sad optimism in “To You” by this new Irish producer/vocalist duo that makes you want to give the sunrise another chance.

I say Young Wonder’s singles are Passion Pit-like because of their abrasive, high-pitched dreamlike loops that sound like Uilleann pipes, and the Bjork voice of Rachel Koeman which all amount to a sort of lovely, wild “Sleepyhead”y agony. It’s the sound of unfounded nostalgia, of running bare-assed in the woods, of a Williamsburg circa 2000 hangover, of clinging onto youth as tightly as you can. No one can deny the power of “To You” to make people feel happy-sad.

Not all of Young Wonder’s singles are as pop-dramatic as “To You” — some of the tracks off their self-titled debut EP (which came out in April) are much more warbly, chill and Balearic. No wonder Greece’s eternally chill Keep Shelly in Athens remixed them about a month ago.

The duo is coming out with another EP called Show Your Teeth in spring next year. But in the meantime enjoy their elegiac video for “To You.”