Yonaka shuts off the outside noise

Faced with the impossible question, Yonaka cannot determine their favourite songs from their new album, Until You’re Satisfied. “Can I have three?” guitarist George Edwards wages. Vocalist Theresa Jarvis encourages the compromise and Edwards makes his picks — before apologetically taking them all back. “This is the first time I’ve been able to listen to one of our bodies of work over and over again, and still not get bored,” he explains. “I think it’s a good sign that we all had that reaction,” bassist Alex Crosby notes. “We’ve all listened to these songs hundreds [of times].”

Until You’re Satisfied has been percolating in Yonaka’s collective consciousness for years, with some songs dating back half a decade. Being their first full-length LP since 2019’s Don’t Wait ‘Til Tomorrow — their last new material was 2023’s Welcome To My House EP — Until You’re Satisfied is written with a savage candour, tackling desire, loss and heartbreak. During their hiatus, Jarvis, Edwards and Crosby confronted the “carnage” that threatened the group. Reborn as a trio, Yonaka broke out of their comfort zone, compelled to distort and distill everything they once knew about writing songs. “If we don’t have honesty,” Jarvis asserts, “then we don’t have anything.”

Paulina Subia: Since your last release, you went through a sort of “flux” period. , reassessing your impetus for being in the band. What factors played into keeping Yonaka going, into this new phase?

Theresa Jarvis: We never stopped writing. Then, we had a moment where there was a bit of carnage going on within the band, and we were like, “Where are we at? Is everyone happy? What are we doing?” It takes those honest conversations to really understand what you want. Sometimes, you think that you don’t want something, but then it could be taken away from you [and] you realise, actually, that’s everything you want.

Alex Crosby: It was like a newfound appreciation. 

George Edwards: It literally lasted a day. We were in Austria, having a really tough conversation. I was basically like, “Yeah, I don’t want to do this anymore,” then we played a show the next day and I was like, “Actually, no, fuck that!”

TJ: I also feel like that had to happen for us to build a stronger bond. We’ve been in a band for 10 years, so you go through that thing where you love each other, you hate each other. It’s like a family vibe.

GE: It’s like a near-death experience, and then someone does the electric paddles on your chest [and you say], “Yeah, we’re back. Okay, cool.”

“It’s like a near-death experience.”

PS: The creation of Until You’re Satisfied was done with a very insular approach, only between the three of you and your co- producer, Dimitri Tikovoi. How did this freedom empower the record?

AC: The majority of our material is all self-produced. [To Theresa] You’d done some sessions with Dimitri and you had quite a good flow and chemistry. 

TJ: Then, we started doing writing sessions with him. It’s rare when you find another person to work well with, and Dimitri was that. We asked, “Do you want to come to the studio and record [for] us?” And he was like, “Absolutely.” So, we went to Belgium and recorded 15 songs on drums, bass and guitar at ICP [Studios] over nine days. Then, we recorded everything else — all the additional production and vocals — here, in our living room.

PS: There’s an evident confidence that’s seeped into Until You’re Satisfied’s lyrics and the expansiveness of the production. How have your approaches changed over time, especially considering the time spent between this LP and your last?

TJ: For me, it was the most honest. Lyrically, I touch more on love. I would change melodies and lyrics quite a few times, once we had the music there. I would hear the music in a new way, thinking, “Okay, I need to push a little harder on that, or I need to be more rhythmic.”

AC: I think as a whole, we didn’t settle until we were all totally happy. With one song in particular, ‘Cruel’, we did 30 different versions of the chorus until we were happy with it. Personally, I think I used to want to try and make things sound more perfect and edit myself. But I think on this album, I let happy accidents happen and appreciated the flaws in my playing, that gave me a unique sound.

GE: In the past, I maybe tried to make things a bit too complicated, but I feel like the melody is always going to be king on a song, so [I try] to support that. And still be interesting, but right on the edge of interesting and simple things done well.

PS: A lot of the lyrics deal with the all-consuming sensation of being in love, but also being dismayed at the idea of it, grappling with desire and reality. Does that resonate?

TJ: Absolutely. My brain is very imaginative. I will dump someone, go out with them, cheat on them, break their heart, all in my brain in like, two minutes. I’ll live [a scenario] in my head really quickly, before I’d ever make a decision to do something. I’ll sit with it, daydream and then feel all the emotions through my body and be like, “Right. I’ve got it. I’ve done it.”… I want [the verses] to be sexy and enticing. The words are so important to me.

PS: Is that level of honesty something that you reckon with while writing or do you think, “Let’s be as honest as possible”?

TJ: It’s a bit of both, really. I could be in that kind of situation in my real life and that’s why I’m talking about it. I usually have to be motivated [and] feeling it inside me. It’s all from experience, so it all comes from a real place. I’m not imagining it.

PS: I thought this was exemplified really well with ‘Stay A Little While Longer’, having such vulnerable lyrics set to a dance rhythm. Could you guys talk about this track more, and maybe how you all approach crafting a ‘sonic whiplash’ in each song?

TJ: That song is about death and losing someone, and people don’t necessarily have to listen to it like death. I’m asking you to stay a little while, like, “Don’t leave me.”

AC: People can get their own interpretation from it, can’t they?

TJ: Because it’s quite a heavy topic, the music takes it to this dreamy, wild place, which I absolutely adore. But I had to fight to get the song on the album because [Alex] wasn’t really into it. I was like, “Please, we need to do this!” That song is so stuck in me; I knew that it had to be on there. But it took us a second to get right because it goes from that moment of nothing to massive, and we really had to figure that transition out… It was a marriage of sounds.

AC: I think we’ve always had very different influences, individually, but with this album, we all had a common ground on a lot of ‘90s music: The Cardigans, Alanis Morissette, My Bloody Valentine.

TJ: Also, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails. We’re all massive Jeff Buckley fans, as well.

PS: This might be strange, but I thought ‘Miss Millennial’ kind of had a Korn vibe to it?

GE: Yes, that’s exactly it! I remember [Korn] was a reference of mine, especially the guitar bits. Very ‘Freak on a Leash’.

AC: We never actually had a conversation [about] what we wanted the album to be; it just kind of took a turn that way, for some reason.

GE: It started with ‘Problems’, didn’t it? After a day of coming up with nothing, we just wrote it instantly. And we thought, “Well, that’s the next chapter.”

TJ: We had songs already from before that, like ‘Best of Me’, [which] is five years old. But we also knew that we wanted to bring that [song] to this album… We were writing and the common link, lyrically, was love. And we were like, “Oh my God, ‘Bestof Me’.”

GE: I’m so happy we waited with that song. It feels like the best time for that [song] to ever come in. Another one is the song ‘Try’, which took a few times around to really hone in.

TJ: I guess that’s how we’ve approached this album differently to how we’d usually write music. In the past, we’d write the track and that’d be finished. There’s three or four songs on the album that we went back to and changed a lot. That’s one difference that we’ve brought to this album: we just kept going back and making sure it was the best it could be.

“I will dump someone, go out with them, cheat on them, break their heart, all in my brain in like two minutes.”

PS: Theresa, I saw that you run your Broken Bunnies book club. Do your literary influences trickle in when you write songs?

TJ: I think so. I love vampires, and with [the song] ‘Cruel’, that was quite an influence

for me. This is such a weird, funny thing, but have you seen The Vampire Diaries? Klaus is always like, “Hello, love,” and how I say “love” in ‘Best of Me’, is from that. I’m so obsessed. With books, I love reading fiction so much and I think, because I’m reading all these fun stories, it gets in my head and then, it gets in the music.

PS: What do you all hope listeners take with them after listening to Until You’re Satisfied?

GE: I want them to love it as much as we do. It feels like the first time, in a long time, where we’ve collectively had such a positive reaction to something that we’ve made. So, I hope the love we put into it is reciprocated.

TJ: And I hope that it resonates with them so much that they feel like a song was written for them. That’s the sign of a great song: when you think they’re talking to you because it makes sense to your life.