Mods beware: the rockers are resurgent in Brighton. Youthful quartet Yonaka (singer Theresa Jarvis, guitarist George Edwards, bassist Alex Crosby and drummer Robert Mason) formed in the seaside city three years ago, and have been making waves among tippers for the top. The band themselves have circumspectly estimated that it’ll be “a couple of years” before they headline Glastonbury.
You can hear their ambition in their songs as well as their words – unashamedly major-label (they signed to Atlantic imprint Ass last year), they make a shiny, armoured pop with metallic, QOTSA-style riffs, hip-hop rhythms and grimy UK attitude. Their 2017 single Wouldn’t Want to Be Ya detailed Jarvis’s thoughts on her absentee father; “everyone has got someone that they despise because they’ve been left or betrayed”, she has said. Yonaka’s new EP, Teach Me to Fight, barrels in with Fired Up, its post-emo anthemics fit for a world in which the likes of Paramore and the 1975 have blurred the lines between pop and rock, while the title track combines KO-riffing with rogueish rhyming from Jarvis.
They’re determined, they’ve said, not to be just another buzz band. “We’re aiming seriously big, the biggest,” Jarvis told NME last year. “We want to make a proper living from music and it’s the only thing any of us can do. It’s the only way.” You get the feeling you wouldn’t want to be standing in her way.
• Yonaka’s EP Teach Me to Fight is out 17 August on Asylum Records. Tour dates include Victorious festival, Portsmouth, and Reading festival on 24 August; Tenement Trail, Glasgow, 29 September; and Electric Ballroom, London, 11 October
