News

The new EP by Lionel Boy titled "Who Is Dovey?" is officially out today, June 26th, 2020.  It’s a mix of sunshine psych & soul infusing spacey synthesizers, impromptu breakbeats & bedroom pop with influences from his native home of Hawaii and has gathered early praise from Fader, Flood, Uproxx & NPR.  Expect more from Lionel Boy throughout the year and into 2021.  Mahalo!

Jonah Yano releases his debut album, souvenir, this week of Father's Day.  As Wonderland Magazine explains in a recent interview: "The 11-track album explores his connection to his Japanese heritage with jazz bass lines and mixtures of soulful melodies and relatable lyrics."  souvenir is available digitally as well as on LP, CD & cassette.

In anticipation of his upcoming EP - Lionel Boy shares a third, jazzy, R&B-tinged single titled "Lately." As the FLOOD premiere states: "The new track exhibits a continuation of the bedroom-confined sound of its predecessors ('Lost & 'Summer Fun'), recalling the electro-pop of SoCal contemporaries like TV Girl."

Jonah Yano releases "strawberry!"  Roaming through the vast, snowy streets of Toronto, Jonah lyrically explores the connection he still has to his Japanese heritage singing "strawberry is the cloth that i am cut from...who’d have thunk i’d leave out with the lump sum." Co-produced with Monsune and the first song he recorded for his upcoming LP, Jonah says he was inspired by “kraut rock” which is defined by the era’s long droning heavy guitar riffs and static chord progressions. He also says it's the loudest song he's ever made. Recording the album between Tokyo's Red Bull studios, a log cabin in Nagato, Toronto's Studio 69, and his own home, 'souvenir' (out Father's Day, June 21st, via Innovative Leisure) features collaborations with his father Tatsuya Muraoka, BADBADNOTGOOD, and Jacques Greene. Read more about Jonah's collaborations, his identity beyond art, and embracing personal subjects via Cool Hunting.

Last week, Lionel Boy shared “Lost,” a song which The FADER described as “a detuned slacker-pop song that builds to a satisfyingly down-tempo guitar hook”. Today he is following up with the breezy and buoyant “Summer Fun”. Both songs are from the upcoming Who Is Dovey? EP, out June 26th. Lionel Boy also shared the socially distanced live performance video of “Summer Fun”.  “Summer Fun” is an ode to his days at summer camp in Oahu:

"I don’t know what you guys got going on in the mainland, but back on Oahu during the summer time we got all these elementary kids in this program called Summer Fun. It’d at the school you just spent all year at, but with kids from all over, and you just played all day. Anyway, after watching that show on Hulu, Pen15, I thought it’d be funny to sing about some childhood memories. My first girlfriend was during Summer Fun. Talk about holdin hands and passin notes and all that haha. But once it was done, all these kids would split up and head back to their school districts. So I never really saw her after that. There was a lot of New Edition inspiration throughout this one. “Cool it Now” to be specific."