Yumi Zouma exclusively for Mavoy Music
Yumi Zouma are a band from New Zealand that I was always very fond of. I’ve discovered them with Keep It Close To Me off their first record Yoncalla, released back in 2016. I was a huge fan of this album and the following Willowback, released a year later, and I even decided to go see them live in Berlin, my first international trip of this kind.
But I was also always hoping to invite them to Poland, I remember lobbying for that show under every social media post about tour and it looked like I got lucky when Warsaw was included in their 2022 tour. I got my tickets immediately – by then, Yumi Zouma became one of my most listened bands of all time, old or new, according to Last.fm. Unfortunately, the show was scheduled to take place in the beginning of full Russian invasion of Ukraine, with a lot of refugees arriving in the city. For a while, I believed that it was the band’s decision to cancel – from our conversations, I finally learned that it was the venue.
But fortunately, Yumi Zouma finally came to Warsaw in March, the show was amazing, they apparently loved it here and they’re interested in returning. I got in touch with YZ’s Charlie Ryder and ask him a few questions about their new album No Love Lost To Kindness, how it differs from their other releases and about the future of the group.
And yes, the plan is to do more interviews. I was teasing a different article before, with an artist I very much adore, but I can’t get them to answer these questions, despite earlier promises. So I don’t know if this one will happen at all. I hope it will. But I will knock on many unexpected doors and I will probably have some really big articles for you in the future and grow as an interviewer. I’m still regularly surprised by follows that I didn’t expect, it’s just not on Twitter anymore, but now on Bluesky and also, to my surprise, Instagram. So who knows what’s going to happen, but, seemingly, good things are coming.
Mavoy Music: As someone who was originally quite disappointed when you proclaimed "we are not a dream pop band anymore", I must say I love the new record, it's still early, but it’s a contender for Album Of The Year of my blog :) I can still hear some dream pop and shoegaze in a few songs, but I also really like the darkness, the heaviness, "the rock" of it all. It's DEFINITELY NOT „warm” and „delicate”, which are two adjectives I usually described YZ with, before this record. What were the biggest challenges for you in creating this new sound, a distinction from your previous releases, yet also a continuation of sort?
Charlie: I think the challenge was less about deliberately moving away from something, and more about letting ourselves follow what felt exciting. For a long time, we were probably associated with a certain sheen or atmosphere, and that can become a bit of a creative ceiling if you start protecting it too much. This record came from being more comfortable with contrast, letting things feel heavier, more direct, sometimes even a bit rough around the edges.
Mavoy Music: No Love Lost To Kindness is a fantastic title, who came up with it and how do you interpret it? And how did you create the artwork for the record, which I also think represents the record very well?
Charlie: The title came out of a few different phrases we had floating around, and it stuck because No Love Lost To Kindness can read as super hard and cold or sincere depending on how you approach it, which felt right for the lyrics and tone of the record. The artwork followed a similar instinct, we wanted something a bit disorentiating, so when our designer Lorenzo came up with the idea to use the whirl image as the cover we were super keen.
Mavoy Music: Yumi Zouma are the only band I ever went abroad to see and I was hoping to get this Warsaw show off the ground for a long time. Anyway, I’m glad that it finally happened, it was fantastic, it was great to talk, get autographs and pics. But the show definitely evolved from 2017, and just like the sound, it feels darker now. Even the older songs are arranged differently. So what was the process of creating the live show for this tour specifically?
Charlie: The live show has definitely changed - earlier on, we were probably just trying to recreate the recordings as faithfully as possible. Now we think more about dynamics, pacing, creating space and embracing silence etc. With this tour, we leaned into making the set feel quite stark and confronting, putting Christie's voice more at the forefront.
Mavoy Music: Where do you see yourself on a local New Zealand stage? Lorde is obviously the biggest name that came out of this wave but from UMO, The Naked And Famous, Broods, The Beths and now the young artists, like Vera Ellen who opened for you during this tour - how close are you to other acts from NZ and in what direction do you see New Zealand music following into?
Charlie: New Zealand is quite a small place musically, so there’s always been a sense of overlap and awareness between artists, even if everyone’s doing very different things. We’ve crossed paths with a lot of those acts over the years in one way or another. But there isn’t really a single “New Zealand sound” anymore, artists are pulling from all sorts of influences and building their own lanes.
Mavoy Music: How does your writing process look like? How are the duties shared between the bandmates?
Charlie: It tends to start with one person bringing in a riff or a chord progression, and then from there it spirals, with everyone inputting into the arrangement. Lyrics and vocals often come later once we've tracked the instrumental.
Mavoy Music: I need to ask a specific question about one of the new album tracks on No Love Lost To Kindness. My favourite is Drag (I guess it’s because it’s most „gaze-y”), but loving the new direction, there’s one track that really surprised me – Cowboy Without A Clue with its sitar, played by Tamil artist Kumar Kishor. That one is really cool. So how was this particular track created?
Charlie: That was one where Josh had a demo and we fleshed it out in the studio. Then he made a trip to India where he was keen to collab with a sitar player. This track was lacking a bit of sparkle so we thought it would suit this one. We ended up adding even more sparkle by way of pedal steel (via our mate Tom Healy) and a bunch of different synths etc, so it's probably the most textured and shimmery track on the album.
Mavoy Music: How do you see yourselves in next 10 years? Is there anything you haven't done yet but you really wish you would?
Charlie: We’ve not really ones for planning that far ahead, the goal these days is mostly just to stay friends and have the band be as fun and stress-free a thing as possible :)
CLASSIC YUMI ZOUMA
NO LOVE LOST TO KINDNESS
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