At first listen, Neil Young’s new song “Soon I Might Be Going” comes across like a sad shake of the head at the hot and Trumpy 2020s. Electric guitars fizzle with the slow majesty of a dying campfire; Young’s rooster-crow voice sounds tired and hoarse. He sings of a president on TV tearing down the old White House. He describes a Christmas in the Rockies that’s warm as summer, during which “the clouds that used to pour the rain / Are billowy and strange.” He notices new cars on the street, new buildings in his town, and feels like reality is starting to resemble fiction.But this is not a lament for the present—or at least not only that. One line references a “new” movie, The Crimson Pirate, which was released in 1952, when Young was about 7 years old. Back then, the president on TV would have been Harry Truman, who oversaw his own gut renovation of the White House. The 80-year-old Young could be remembering a warm Christmas from childhood. He’s cataloging similarities between his early days and now—including a sense that a “revolution’s coming / Like a fighter with a fist.”Young himself is an icon of a revolution that pitted the Baby Boomers against their elders—but all along, he was more interested in the links across generations. In a voice blending choir-boy innocence and weathered-cowboy experience, he captured feelings of recognition between the young man and the old man, the child and the parent, the modern and the historical. His discography, filled with sequels and callbacks, has moved between folk quietude and rockin’ raggedness in a manner that’s felt less like the progression of a story than the cycling of seasons. As he once famously said onstage, his music is “all one song.” Now his latest studio album, Second Song, offers a particularly moving experience of time travel.At a time when many of his contemporaries have slowed their output, Young’s maintained teenage restlessness. The past 10 years have brought at least 13 new albums—some with freshly written tracks, some with unearthed ones, some with live recordings—as well as a number of reissues and nonmusical projects. He’s stayed in the news by taking important stances, like by pulling his music from Spotify for two years to protest its platforming of Joe Rogan, while maintaining an online newspaper called NYA Times Contrarian (recent headline: “Elon Musk—Among the Most Evil of the Billionaires”). Hard-core fans have kept up, but the magic of his late period is that it’s happening regardless of who’s paying attention. One might, at any point, dip in and find a banging rerecording of a proto-grunge masterpiece, a book about high-quality audio technology, or an okay song about the misdeeds of white guys. But Young’s new album—his second studio effort with the Chrome Hearts, the band he formed in 2024 when his longtime group, Crazy Horse, went on break—feels like a minor landmark. Maybe that’s because it addresses mortality in a way that feels stark for an artist who paused touring earlier this year because he was, he said, “listening to my body” (he’s performing again now). Or maybe it’s because the album seems unusually coherent. Young has stayed prolific because of what my colleague James Parker once called “a highly evolved and very disciplined aesthetic of half-assedness.” (Young himself has renounced some of his most classic lyrics as “gibberish.”) The first Chrome Hearts album, 2025’s Talkin to the Trees, was a variety pack of short, noisy sketches. Second Song is different: gentle instrumentation, lengthy runtimes, unified purpose. On “Day After Day,” he explains, “There’s something I want to say and say it slow.”[Read: What happens when a beloved rock star gets fed up?]On the opener, “The Foggy Edge of Time,” a piano’s steady pulse mixes with guitar licks that seem to be playing backwards, creating the sense of a reverie unfolding. Young tours through his life, juxtaposing highlights (like the birth of his three kids) with “bumps along the way.” Then he arrives at a refrain that’s sung a bit funny: “alcohol / alcohol.” The effect is to wryfully brighten what might seem like a misty and sentimental exercise; throughout the album, stunning observations are mixed with goofy or plainly underwritten ones. Young’s famously loose, improvisatory creative approach (or, yes, half-assedness) is one of the things he’s examining: On “Second Song,” he wakes up with “a melody and a rhyme” in his head, adding, “The words just tumbled forward.”Still, the scale of that tumbling is epic. The seven-minute-long “Day After Day” is a catalog of ordinary occasions: making coffee, listening to the drips of melting snow, hanging out with his wife, Daryl Hannah. An acoustic riff drives and an organ hums while the rhythm section keeps time not quite steadily, sometimes slipping behind. Listening crystallizes the way that life’s monotony can be a blessing. As the song’s banalities pile up, so does the realization that sooner or later, the routine will have to end.He makes that thought explicit over the nine minutes of “Soon I Might Be Going,” in which the resemblance between the past and present serves as reassurance that “if I’m not here to see it / Doesn’t mean it’s gone away.” But for Young, always the protest rocker, acceptance of time’s passage is not the same as shrugging at it. On the title track (more than 11 minutes long), he describes young generations denied the optimism that their parents held at their age. “Too much has changed around us / But we can bring it back somehow,” Young sings, stretching and shaking the last syllable.In addition to these voyages through memory—and one short paean to Hannah—the album features two rerecordings of songs he wrote early in his career, before achieving stardom. Sung with his teenage band the Squires, the 1964 track “I’ll Love You Forever” was a gooey Beach Boys homage; the new version is a frayed country song with a touch of tropical sparkle. As Young vows devotion to a lover for eternity—a vow that signifies something a bit different at his age than it did when he first wrote it—he brings out the way that the march of decades can change the meaning of even pop’s simplest lyrical tropes. But what’s more astonishing is how the song hasn’t changed—how across eras, across all sorts of sounds, the same brain has been at work, pondering the mystery of forever.