Yumi Zouma Share ‘Astral Projection’ Before Album Release
Ahead of their forthcoming fourth studio album Present Tense, due out March 18 on [PIAS] Australia, beloved New Zealand alternative pop band Yumi Zouma have unveiled their latest single, Where The Light Used To Lay.
Ahead of the release of their fourth studio album, beloved New Zealand alternative pop band Yumi Zouma today share the final single , Astral Projection to be lifted from the record. Present Tense is due out tomorrow, Friday, March 18 on digital and CD formats, with vinyl to follow on April 8.
Throughout their fourth LP, which follows 2020’s acclaimed album Truth or Consequences, Yumi Zouma expand on their established, ethereal dream pop with defiance and a palpable sense of urgency, drawing on collaboration to push the four-piece out of their comfort zone, looking to explore the extreme edges of their music, resulting in their most formidable release to date. At the same time, the four-piece approached their songwriting in a more deliberative, time-rich manner, affording each track on Present Tense the space and opportunity to gestate at its own pace, content to let ideas come into their own
The final track on the album, Astral Projection epitomises this revitalised creative process, originally conceived by guitarist Josh Burgess, who felt as though he’d been handed a sliver of brilliance after the song had been through multiple rewrite attempts by bassist Charlie Ryder and vocalist Christie Simpson, before ultimately abandoning it. “It was as if I’d been given this rescue cat who had the potential to be great,” he says.
Between them, the song developed into a bass-driven slowburner, moody and oddly prescient, carried by an emphatic backbeat and a widescreen guitar lick awash in nostalgia. “Hold me in your arms, I know this wouldn’t last / I know I shouldn’t feel safe, but I do / Hearing you don’t care, I’m out of view,” Simpson sings as Yumi Zouma’s fourth LP itself fades out, a final message on the importance of connection and the ephemerality of life. Behind her, the outro twinkles like a summer skyline at dusk, violets and grays intermingling with the bright glow of a thousand open windows. “I daydream about playing that one live,” Burgess says. “In bed, I’ll close my eyes before sleep and imagine the drumbeat kicking in.”
Astral Projection arrives on the back of previously released singles Where The Light Used To Lay, In The Eyes Of Our Love, Mona Lisa and Give It Hell, which garnered praise from The Fader, Stereogum, Billboard, NME AU, The Partae, Flying Nun, Happy Mag and more, and was spun on the coveted Triple J’s 2021 with Richard Kingsmill.
The accompanying video for Astral Projection, filmed by director Alex Ross Perry (Soccer Mommy, Sleigh Bells, 2018’s feature film Her Smell), is the final instalment in a trilogy of narrativised, interconnected videos that follows on from In The Eyes Of Our Love and Where The Light Used To Lay.
On his approach to the project, Perry shares: “Agreeing to make three interconnected videos was something I should have thought about for longer than fifteen seconds before agreeing to it. The anxiety of conceptualising a small story, that can be told without dialogue, and set to music, gripped me from the moment my video call with the band ended. Their thoughts were excellent, specific, and unachievable with the time and resources I would be able to pull together.
“But I began to feel inspired by the concept of taking these vast ideas and situating them within a single location, transforming the aesthetic, visuals and mood to match the three different songs,” he continues. “My only chance for success was to rely heavily on a great cast and crew to create these spaces and film them in a way that felt consistently alive and unique. Fortunately for me, they all over delivered.“
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The theme of isolated togetherness and distant creativity has been a throughline for the band throughout their career. Originally formed in New Zealand, the members of Yumi Zouma now come together from around the globe: New York City ( Josh Burgess – guitar, vocals), London (Charlie Ryder – guitar, bass, keys), Christchurch (Christie Simpson – vocals, keys) and Wellington (Olivia Campion – drums). And while you may assume that this global spread held their creative process in good stead for the realities of COVID-19 – the opposite proved to be true.
Without looming tour dates driving them to release new music, the prolific band found themselves at a standstill. So they set a date. By September 1st, 2021, the album needed to be finished, regardless of whether they’d be able to tour it or even meet to record together. With a mix of remote and in-person sessions in studios in Wellington, Florence, New York, Los Angeles, and London, what began in fits and starts became a committed practice again as Yumi Zouma dug through demos from as early as 2018 to collaborate on and make relevant to the peculiar moment in time the band, and world, was experiencing. “The lyrics on these songs feel like premonitions, in some regards,” Simpson reflects. “So much has changed for us, both personally and as a band, that things I wrote because the words sounded good together now speak to me in ways I didn’t anticipate.”
Bringing in new collaborators from different disciplines and from around the globe, the band enlisted disparate friends to contribute pianos, saxophones, woodwinds, pedal steels and strings, multiple mixers in Ash Workman (Christine & The Queens, Metronomy), Kenny Gilmore and Jake Aron (Grizzly Bear, Chairlift), and recruited the mastering expertise of Antoine Chabert (Daft Punk, Charlotte Gainsbourg) for the first time. In the end, two years away from the road and the bustle of touring life proved beneficial for the group, affording a new appreciation for the friendship they’ve sustained and the opportunity an abundance of time off-cycle offered. “We used to run on adrenaline, and if a song wasn’t working we’d just nip it in the bud and move on. This process gave us the opportunity to really sit with songs and rethink them until they felt like they belonged in the collection,” Burgess says.
There’s a defiance heard throughout Present Tense, a refusal to bend to what might seem fated, communicated not only through lyrics but in the boldness of these arrangements, metamorphosing between tracks without ever losing momentum. Dedicated to an embattled past, Yumi Zouma’s fourth album is the band’s offering to a tenuous future. “To 2020, and the memory of all that was lost,” they write in the album’s liner notes. “Kia Kaha.”
Present Tense by Yumi Zouma
is out March 18 on [PIAS] Australia
Preorder: https://yumi-zouma.ffm.to/present-tense
