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Montreal and Japan-based musician Jonah Yano announces his fourth studio album. Spin (out January 29, 2027).
Spin gathers the gentle, naïve, simplicities of Yano’s debut album, 2020’s souvenir, the sprawling arrangements of his BADBADNOTGOOD-produced sophomore effort, portrait of a dog, and the spirit of improvisation that animated 2024’s, Jonah Yano & the Heavy Loop, into a singular, concentrated document. Songwriting, as it always has been in Yano’s work, remains at the center as he espouses ease and self-assuredness.
To celebrate the album’s announcement, Yano releases a pair of songs from Spin. The title track offers a lush welcome to the project with thesis statement lyrics, “If life spins you around / Well then I’ll spin” punctuated by Yano’s warm vocals presented in layered harmony. While lead single “Holding On” offers wistful, groove-heavy piano, guitar and clarinet below Yano’s spare, delicate voice. Longtime collaborator and GRAMMY-award winning producer, Scott Zhang, aka Monsune co-produced the latter song with Yano.
Written and arranged across Montreal and Northern Japan’s main island of Hokkaidō, and recorded at Port William Sound in Mountain Grove, Ontario over five days, the 11 songs on Spin present Yano’s sonic identity at its simplest and strongest. He is backed by his long-time band, The Heavy Loop, with additional production contributions from Zhang (aka Monsune) and recorded with engineer Jonah Bonnetta. The shimmering water on the album cover is a picture of Hokkaidō’s Lake Shikotsu, where Yano would swim while writing the new songs. Previously, Yano has long made collaboration a cornerstone of his music – past collaborators include Mk.Gee, BADBADNOTGOOD, Clairo, Helena Deland, Ouri, Le Ren, Slauson Malone 1, Mustafa, and his father Tatsuya Muraoka among many others. On Spin, Yano is less interested in upending his musical language with collaborators than he is in distilling it on his own, reflecting the rewarding solitude of its writing process.
Yano was born in Hiroshima in 1994 and moved to Vancouver when he was four. He grew up listening to blues guitar and classic rock, learned piano under his grandmother’s tutelage, and later picked up guitar through a “School of Rock-esque” middle school program. In 2016, after moving to Toronto, he began recording demos on his cellphone and became immersed in the city’s underground music community. Many of the musicians he met there—including Monsune, Jacques Greene, Joseph L’Étranger, MONEYPHONE, and BADBADNOTGOOD—would become collaborators and friends, while helping him develop the technical vocabulary that would shape his early recordings. Yano’s work since his 2019 debut EP has earned praise from publications including Pitchfork, Billboard, The Fader, Metal, CLASH, Exclaim!, and Complex, while his music has been featured on NTS Radio, NPR’s Weekend Edition, and CBC Music’s The Intro. He has performed twice on COLORS and appeared at festivals including the Montreal International Jazz Festival and EFG London Jazz Festival, as well as touring extensively across Canada, Europe, and Japan. He has twice been a finalist for the SOCAN Songwriting Prize, for “delicate” in 2021 and “always” in 2023. His work has drawn support from figures including Gilles Peterson, Benji B, and the late Virgil Abloh.
In 2027, Yano will embark on his first American headline tour. More details to be announced soon.
L'Eclair explain, “‘Excelsior” was one of the first tracks we wrote after the release of Cloud Drifter. Post album release, we were motivated to push toward a new sound—something sharper and more direct, finally bringing the raw, wild energy of our live shows together with our modern approach to production. That’s how ‘Excelsior’ was born. It’s the fastest L’Eclair song to date and pays homage to a main influence of ours: dub music. We took the classic stepper rhythm and made it our own, layering in 303s, fuzzed-out guitars, and a cinematic bridge that keeps building and shifting until the very end. For us, the track feels like a manifesto: L’Eclair is back, with a new sound built to hit harder, travel further, and fill bigger rooms.”Growing up in Bulgaria in the late 1990s, the Lilov brothers were shaped in a myriad of unseen ways by the centuries-old folk music that filtered through their daily lives. It helped mold their creative spirit and inspired them to begin making noise together at a young age, and that unique and intuitive creative alchemy hFas been a foundation of guitarist/keyboardist Stef and drummer Yavor’s band L’Eclair since they formed it in their adopted home of Switzerland a decade ago.Echo is self produced by the brothers and as ever, L’Eclair occupy their own peculiar corner of the dance floor, where hypnotic repetition gives way to unexpected detours, locked-in rhythms collide with warped electronics, and vintage textures meet a distinctly modern sense of space. The result is another playful, exploratory chapter from a band that has spent the better part of a decade proving that groove can be both a destination and a way of getting wonderfully lost.
L’Eclair, the electrifying and genre-hopping Swiss ensemble formed and led by Bulgarian brothers Stef and Yavor Lilov, has announced their new album, CLOUD DRIFTER, out June 20. Meticulously crafted over the last four years, CLOUD DRIFTERr marks a departure from L’Eclair’s signature instrumental music, featuring vocals from a wide slate of frequent collaborators – including Pink Siifu, Girl Named GOLDEN, Gelli Haha, INES and more.
Alongside the announcement, L’Eclair has shared “ODESSOS,” a driving and atmospheric club-ready album highlight that features vocals from Phoebe Coco and A Ghost Column. The song transmits the infectious energy of the band’s live shows, and is a perfect introduction to the dynamic, high energy collaborative spirit at the heart of CLOUD DRIFTER. Having toured with the likes of The Cinematic Orchestra and WITCH–including writing and recording for the latter’s 2023 and forthcoming 2025 albums–and produced for wide-ranging artists including Varnish La Piscine and Allah-Las member Maston, the Lilov brothers have assembled a vast network of likeminded musicians. Across CLOUD DRIFTER, they keenly curate a cohesive vision incorporating many disparate contributions.
L’Eclair has built an international fanbase thanks to its impressive command of rhythm, dynamics and electro/acoustic alchemy, which has nodded equally to vocal-free titans such as Can and Tortoise, expansive, spacey and blissed-out jams (2021’s Confusions) and more stripped-down, feel-good and genre-jumping destinations (the 2018 debut Polymood). Two live sessions for KEXP have accumulated nearly 900,000 views combined, beaming L’Eclair onto the playlists of adventurous listeners around the world.