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“It felt right to do it now”, Theresa Jarvis reflects as her band, Yonaka, prepare to release ‘Until You’re Satisfied’, their riotous sophomore album, arriving nearly seven years on from their debut and recorded largely in secret.
“We were gonna write an album and not tell anyone else. Let’s just go and do it. When you tell people, they’ll want to hear a song, and they’ll have notes to give, and it influences how you move forward.”
“We were all very eager to make that bigger body of work make sense, which sometimes can be hard”, she continues.
“Sometimes, you get a bit stuck in finding the meaning of the album. It can get a bit sticky, and you don’t go outside of specific topics. But we just didn’t do that. We wrote loads of songs, picked our favourites and it just felt good. I don’t think we struggled to write this album.”
Having toured relentlessly in the intervening years since their debut and finding breakout success with the track ‘Seize The Power’, Yonaka are approaching ‘Until You’re Satisfied’ with a refreshed outlook, unafraid to experiment and push the boundaries of what their sound can encompass.
On the eve of its release, we caught up with Theresa, bassist Alex Crosby and guitarist George Edwards to get the lowdown on the making of their most confident effort to date.
THE SOUND
While the group have never been afraid of pushing their sound into new directions, be that heavy, punk or pop influences, one newer sound that rears its head at several points through ‘Until You’re Satisfied’ is the ‘90s industrial edge of the like of Nine Inch Nails, bringing an extra flare to the likes of recent single ‘Cruel’.
“With the industrial sounds, we’ve always been a fan of that kind of stuff going back to ‘Waves’, which was from really early on in our catalog”, Theresa reflects. “We’ve always loved that kind of sound and wanted to try and put it in somewhere. We weren’t consciously trying to sound industrial”.
“It was a mood we wanted to capture, a sortof dissonance in places”, Alex adds.
“We struggled a bit with ‘Cruel’”, George interjects. “As there were a couple of variations of the chorus, and then we decided to keep the whole thing industrial…”
“The whole song was there apart from the chorus”, Theresa explains. “It took us a while to nail it, but that actually happened a few times with some other tracks on the album as well. They really took a different turn. We would have recorded the instruments and then I’d have written a whole different melody and lyric on top, or vice versa.”
“I think that was one of the hardest points in the album, creating that song”, Alex admits. “We went through so many differentversions but we didn’t want to give up because the other parts of the song we loved so much. The chorus needed to match that. We’re not going to settle and just puta chorus in.”
Elsewhere, ‘Try’ found its inspiration in an unlikely place, the soundscape unlocked as the band recorded their dreamy coverversion of Twenty One Pilots’ ‘Lane Boy’ (retitled ‘Lane Girl’) for Rock Sound’s ‘Blurryface Reborn’ compilation.
“That was done at the same time”, Theresa tells us. “I feel like we attacked that cover a little bit differently to begin with and then realised we needed to just totally rethink it. I really love the way that cover came out because it has a slight shoegazy vibe to it. ‘Try’ sounded a lot different to what it sounds like now in the beginning and I actually do think working on ‘Lane Girl’ really influenced it.”
THE LYRICS
With a short opening ‘Intro’ track setting the tone of the LP, one key lyric immediately stands out and establishes the overall theme of the record to follow – ‘help me create a beautiful disaster’.
“It’s setting up the record in a creepy, fairytale kind of way”, George agrees. “I know it’s an intro but of all the songs we’ve done, that’s probably the most different we’ve ever done. It feels nice and creepy and very inviting – what’s gonna happen next?”
“That 50 seconds, or whatever it is, really sets you up to tell the story”, Theresa adds.“It is about the people that you meet inlife that decide your emotions and yourexperiences. It is love, loss, hate, beauty, all of it. It sets up a big story.”
Elsewhere, ‘Miss Millennial’ explores the blame game, the easy excuses and the odd obsession certain areas of society seem to hold around that particular generation.
“I love that one”, Theresa says. “It is about how people get into shit and then they look at you and now it’s your fault. I was playing into that but also taking out my own frustrations around personal relationships. ‘Oh, ok, blame me again, Miss millennial, yeah that’s right’. It’s an easy way out for somebody.”
“That’s been quite a key theme – to be playful when you’re being angry”, she continues. “Some songs can be totally aggressive, absolutely. But I wanted to play more with it. With ‘Miss Millennial’, the title didn’t come to me straight away. I was calling it ‘Broken Radio’ to start with, but what the fuck is a broken radio? That’s not it. Then once I got the title, the verses popped into place. It’s a cheeky, angry song. Blame me, boo hoo bitch, but you’re here because of me.”
THE COLLABORATIONS
With Alex Crosby behind the desk on production duties, the band also teamed up with longtime friend Dimitri Tikovoï, who assisted on several tracks, bringing his wealth of experience across pop, rock and classical projects into the mix.
“He’s a really good friend of ours and we’ve not really worked with other people a lot, especially not writing songs”, Theresa explains. “So this was a nice new thing for us. We’re on the same page. He’s a dream to work with. We went to ICP studio in Belgium with him for nine days and recorded all the drums, bass and the guitars, and then we recorded all the vocals in my living room. Alex and I would do that for about three months in the living room, and then send each song to Dimitri, and he would put some more production stuff on top. It’s really nice when you work with someone really passionate.”
“He’s so experienced in working in big studios and getting the right tones and stuff”, Alex adds. “It’s great to have his expertise in that. On the last couple of EPs, a lot of it was done in the box with plugins and things like that. So it’s nice to get out of that and work in a different way. It was a really good process.”
THE TITLE
“I tried to put it into a song”, Theresa reflects on the album’s title ‘Until You’re Satisfied’, “but it didn’t really work. I think it really sums up the album and us as a band, because it’s like an offering. I’m here to give you what I have. I want to make you happy. And that’s not just to the consumer, that’s to my lover, that’s to my best friend. I’m going to give you a piece of me. That’s the idea of that title.
“I’m a massive fan of Maria Abramović”, she continues. “I’m very into all of her art and how giving it is to the receiver. I thought it was so beautiful. Every time I see this certain video of hers where she stares into her old lover’s eyes that she hasn’t seen for years and years, it literally makes me cry every time I see it. I just felt so connected to that love letter.”
“‘Until You’re Satisfied’ really works for the whole of the album too. You can use it in an angry way. You can use it in a sensitive way. It works on all fronts, but we all love it and we’re all going to get it tattooed on our arms.”
THE FUTURE
With the release date fast approaching, the band are conscious of the fact that, unlike their debut, the follow up comes with a certain weight of expectation. It’s a good problem to have, of course – over the last few years they have worked hard to build a fan community that are excited for the prospect of a new record. But those pre-release butterflies are still there as the trio set out their ambitions for 2026 and beyond.
“I really want to be that person that just goes ‘what will be will be’ and I do have part of that in me”, Theresa says. “But also, of course, I want so many people to hear it. I want so many people to resonate with it. I want it to be everyone’s favourite album. I want people to feel connected to it. I want people to feel like it’s written for them. I want that connection. I want that.”
“The best stuff that we’ve done always comes out when you leave those commercial expectations at the door”, Alex adds, “because there’s no point in tryingto make ‘Seize The Power’ again, because it just won’t work. You need to try and do something new.”
“Although we’ve been around the block a few times, because it’s so special, this feelslike we are doing it for the first time again”, George concludes. “We’ve released records before, but this feels like an actual push, and maybe it’s because we haven’t done it in a while, but there’s a romanticism to this release. I have really high expectations for it, because I believe in it a lot.”
