As the opener, ‘Do Nothing’ slowly builds, you realise that despite the chiming of gentle strings and the sometimes brooding presence of background synths, it is YUNA’s delicate, voice-as-instrument arrays that are what hold everything together, a sort of sonic glue that supports the other shimmering sonics, not the other way around.
And then, ‘Not@Home,’ which follows, is a pulsing, off-kilter, glitchy explosion where the vocals are often lost under a musical maelstrom of creatively conflicting ideas. Take this opening brace of songs together, and you realise that YUNA is about adventure rather than conformity, exploration rather than comfort zones. For her, boundaries only exist to be pushed, barriers to be swerved, demarcations subverted.
The tribal pop groove of ‘Restart’ does nothing to change such conclusions; a high-energy dance track meets art/alt-pop, nor does the cryptically titled ‘4363145’, the sonic equivalent of a storm brewing on the horizon, flashes of lightning marked out by the beats, less a song, more the sound of someone capturing tension in the form of music, literally the sound of the increasingly uncalm before the approaching storm…
… which quite wonderfully never comes. (Okay, it might not be about that at all, but that is the fun of ‘out there’ instrumental music: without lyrics to guide us, we are allowed to find our own interpretations and impose our own meanings.)
Just six songs, but such an array of sounds and styles and ideas and experiments that remind us music-making doesn’t have to stay in its lane, not any more. Artists, in the broadest sense of the word, like YUNA, who wander between worlds, make music on self-made instruments, DJ, run collectives and events for like-minded, free-thinkers, and get as creative with the spaces between and beyond what we might call conventional music as the more recognisable forms, show that playing with concepts such as space, feedback, mood, and noise is exactly what keeps music moving forward.
The three-minute pop song (and she can do those too) might be fine, but it’s been a long time since that format changed the musical landscape.
