Q&A: Making Most of the Here and Now, Yumi Zouma Releases ‘Present Tense’
“THERE WERE MULTIPLE TIMES WHERE WE WERE MILLIMETERS AWAY — from breaking up as a band,” Charlie Ryder of Yumi Zouma tells Luna on a call. It’s a chilly day in London, and Ryder is camera-off while walking his dog, whom he affectionately refers to as “Squishy” during our chat. Every time he mentions past fights and tension within the band, it’s accompanied by laughter and lightheartedness. The band’s newest release, Present Tense, out via Polyvinyl Records, speaks fully to Ryder’s mindset: “It's a reminder to be present, make the most of the here and now in this crazy time to be alive.”
Present Tense is unlike anything Yumi Zouma has released before. The New Zealand-hailing band consisting of singer Christie Simpson, guitarists Josh Burgess and Charlie Ryder, and drummer Olivia Campion almost had too much time to put this album together. The band began working on this LP during the peak of COVID-19 when their previous release, Truth or Consequences, had completed its course. The four-piece works best with a fire lit under their asses, but with no deadline to finish this new album, all their free time was spent creating multiple versions of each song and meticulously developing individual parts of the tracks to a fault. The process led the band down many arguments and fighting for one version of a song over the other. However, with deep patience and a drive to make something great, the result ended with the grandest album Yumi Zouma has released to date.
The album makes a clear departure from their historically lighthearted dream pop sound from previous releases. Present Tense offers deep, contemplative storytelling as it teems with brightness and life. The tight production and clean instrumentation give Simpson’s vocals the space to truly shine through on each track. Lead singles, “Give It Hell” and “Mona Lisa,” air towards effervescent indie rock, whereas the album closer, “Astral Projection,” plays out like a companion piece to The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.” Standout track “In The Eyes Of Our Love” explodes with a fast, bubbly beat, which with the band’s headlining tour in full swing is the perfect opportunity to let loose.
Read Ryder’s conversation with Luna about how Present Tense came to be below.
LUNA: It is such a pleasure to meet you! Congratulations on the new album. I know the band doesn’t all live in one place — where are you all now?
RYDER: More or less the same places we've always been. I've lived in London for the last five years. Josh has lived in New York for, like, the last 10 years, I think. Olivia has lived in Wellington, New Zealand all her life. Christie has lived in Christchurch, New Zealand all her life, except for a year in 2020 [when] she moved to London at the very beginning of lockdown, which she then realized was a big mistake, considering New Zealand was like a COVID-free paradise zone. That was her first overseas experience as well, which must [have been] very strange.
LUNA: Is it a party when you all get together for tour?
RYDER: Oh yeah, especially now. I mean, I don't know about it being a party, but we're always very grateful to be able to meet up because we so infrequently see each other. We're all best friends and we're all talking all hours of the day, so tour is the only time we do get to meet up, and it's a great excuse to catch up, so we value it very much.
LUNA: Most if not all of you are credited as songwriters on your new album. For a band whose members don’t live all in one place, I've never seen one so collaborative with each other.
RYDER: Yeah, it's changed over the years. I guess me and Josh have been the main producers because we do like a lot of mixing and arrangement on Logic. But over the years, Christie and Olivia — our singer and our drummer — have become more and more involved to the point where we now pretty much split all the songwriting credits and everything equally between the four of us.
I think, in this record, it's the first time all four of us have been credited songwriters on every single song on the record. It's a bit of a weird environment because it's not like we sit down at band practice and write the songs together, because we don't have band practices — ever — until the start of the tour. Then maybe we’ll meet up and figure out how to play these songs live that we wrote on the internet.
The way we write is like a series of emails back and forth with different versions of songs in Logic Pro. We've tried previously to attribute different percentages to different parts of the song. And we can't keep it in order for our life — it’s too hard to figure out. It’s basically a big mix, and we like it that way. It means that nothing can be too purposeful. Nothing can be too derivative. One of us might have an idea at the beginning to write a song that sounds like a certain band or something, which is fine. Like, that's a good way to get the ball rolling. But by the end of it, because you have so many different people editing and changing stuff, it sounds completely different. And it's unique. That's what you want, right? You want something unique that no one else could write except the four of you. That’s why we do what we do.
LUNA: When did you start writing the album?
RYDER: Well, when we record, it’s long-term. We're always working on songs… We re-recorded our last album and did something called the Alternate Versions where we rearranged [Truth or Consequences]. After we released that — I think it was September 2020 — we were like, “What are we going to do now?” We got to make most of this lockdown. We got to be productive. So, let's start the next record.
It was a strange period. Usually when we've written stuff previously, it's always been a super fast pace because we've had a tour to do in like two months. We haven't had much time to deliberate on stuff too much. But this was the first time that nothing was on the horizon. COVID just put a stop to everything. We had no tours lined up, or at least all our tours that we had lined out kept getting canceled. And so we had no deadline. Our label was like, “Oh yeah, just take as much time as you want.” And for us, it was like a completely new thing. And it allowed us to go way too deep on everything.
We were making like five, six, seven different versions of all the songs. We were fighting about which version to go with all the time. We've never argued with each other so much. This was the first time we've ever really had friction between us. That's why we chose the Present Tense album title: we had that friction and also the time to go more crazy, but also it's a reminder to be present, make the most of the here and now in this crazy time to be alive.
LUNA: The main genre I've seen people describe Yumi Zouma as is dream pop. Is that something you align yourself with?
RYDER: Yeah, I think it's probably correct to an extent. A lot of influence we have is from that sort of area of the music world, like shoegaze, dream pop, indie/alternative, pop, etc. But we don't really think about it, to be honest. The songs sort of just take [on] a life of their own in the sense that one of us might start off trying to write a song that's a dream pop song but by the end of it … the songs end up being what they want to be. They’re always completely different [compared] to how they started.
I would say this record more than any other [is] quite far past the dream pop genre. There are a lot of songs in here that are very loud, very fast, very rock ’n’ roll; a lot bolder and extremely motivated than before. I think it's a reflection of what we could do and also what kind of music we listen to. There's also a factor of trying to do something different, you know, after you've done eight or nine records. I think one song, “In The Eyes Of Our Love,” was actually a conscious decision not to do a song in a certain genre but to do a song that was faster than we'd ever done before. We wanted a song that we could play live and … really rock out to it; also [to] have something lyrically that maybe stood out a little bit from our normal stuff, you know? At the time when we were writing the songs … the world was pretty much on fire with COVID or protesting in the streets and things like that. It seemed a bit redundant to write lyrics about … ourselves, or falling in love or general dreamy things.
LUNA: I was actually thinking that this album feels more realistic than romantic — a bit more grounded.
RYDER: Yeah, well, the last few years have been pretty dire. I think it just felt silly to be dreaming about positive things or write about, you know, unrealistic things.
LUNA: What were the biggest emotions you've felt over the past two years writing and recording the album?
RYDER: Hatred, probably? (Laughs) I think at some point we all hated each other. There were multiple times where we were millimeters away from breaking up as a band. And this is the first time it's ever been that bad. I think that's just because we had no deadline, and we had too much time on our hands to go away and go deep on things and not meet up and not talk to each other. We're bad enough communicators as it is. The fact that we were able to get too emotionally invested in five different versions of songs and stuff like that … We would just fight all the time about where we wanted to take things, and usually we don't have that luxury. It was intense. And I don't want to do it again. But at the same time I think it's produced a great record and one that we would never be able to produce normally. So I'm kind of grateful that we were able to do that — we were able to produce this record … where we're young and dumb enough to just sort of forget the mean things that we say to each other. Soon we're going to be on tour and happy and together.
LUNA: That reminds me of a lyric in “In The Eyes Of Our Love” that goes "But we won't lose sight of what we said / I'll sing from the dirt instead.” While writing this record, did you ever feel like you were in the trenches writing any of the songs?
RYDER: Yeah — all of them. Probably easier for me to think of ones that were quick to write. All of them were difficult just because all of these songs had gone through the wringer. They've all had half a dozen rewrites. They've all had too many calls and texts where we fought about and argued. In the end, we got great, unique songs.
“Astral Projection,” the last one [on the record], has probably been the biggest mindfuck of all. That's because it started off as an electronic house track — maybe like five or six years ago — called “Hot Dog” that Josh wrote. Over the years, we've basically added new parts, new vocals, new chord progressions, and slowly — like every six months or so — we've seen a new version, and we've got something new and we just could never get it right. And now, six years later, we figured out the reason we couldn't get it right was because we were always struggling on the chorus. We never get a chorus to fit no matter what style we did. Whether it was a rock song, an electronic song, an acoustic song. We were really struggling, and then we figured out, “Let's just cut the chorus.” So, for the first time, we've done a song with no chorus — it's just two verses and a bridge. Quite rare for us, but pretty cool. I think that’s good because sometimes the constraints and the problems — even though we're frustrated for six years; we're trying to figure out a song … they lead you in a direction that you otherwise wouldn't have gone down. I really love that song because it's so unlike anything we've done before. That's why I think it's a great way to finish the album.
LUNA: You mentioned that the band re-recorded your last LP, Truth or Consequences, and named it Truth or Consequences (Alternate Versions). Did that influence or inspire the way you approached Present Tense?
RYDER: Yeah, maybe indirectly, because we sort of did the complete opposite [for Present Tense]. For Alternate Versions, our idea was just to get something out quickly so we could promote Truth or Consequences. So what we actually did was we split up Truth or Consequences in between the four of us. Like, “Okay, here are the files, let's all go away and come back in a couple of weeks with three songs each in completely different styles and see what happens. Then we'll spend another week just editing it and then we'll put it out.” And it was super chill and completely carefree because you've already written the songs and you're already really happy with the original songs, so you don't really care what the second version of the song sounds like.
There's always this problem with us that when we're writing songs together: we get really attached to things and we want them to be in the final version. But if you've already released that final version and you're happy with the contribution that you made and the things you’d love that are in the song, it leaves you in a really peaceful state of mind. That was great, because it meant that we could just sort of do the craziest versions of songs that we would otherwise never have done and also get it done really quickly. I think that showed us that we could do things really quickly and in an interesting way just by dividing things up between ourselves and then coming back at the end to put it all together. But then we sort of did the complete opposite with Present Tense and went deep in the weeds on absolutely everything and invited dozens of contributors and poured our heart and souls into this record. We knew it was gonna be the record that we released at the “end” of the quarantine, and it was going to be us stepping back into the touring world and everything, so we put all this crazy pressure on ourselves.
LUNA: Can you tell me more about the orchestra you got together for the album?
RYDER: So, basically, it wasn't one orchestra. It was a bunch of different individual players, and we got them all to record individually. We edited all the files and everything, arranged it all ourselves, and created orchestras in every song out of the individual files. It was a really intense effort. I think it sounds pretty cool.
We got to work with some pretty incredible people. Andrew Keoghan, who I mentioned before is in Los Angeles, essentially did violin and also ukulele, the saxophone, and piano. Emily Elkin … she's in Angel Olsen's band. She was great — she did cello. And then we got a bunch of different people to do woodwinds, so like sax, clarinet, flute. I think Ian, Patricio. Sophie, Nick… I think they are in different parts of the States. We got a guy in Bulgaria called Zakhar to do a big string arrangement — a big mix of different stuff.
LUNA: That’s really cool how you got so many people and how they’re all just around the world working on one album.
RYDER: They all thought it was crazy, by the way. This is not normally how people make records. Our idea was that we get three different mixing engineers working on like three different songs at the same time, and we'll get it done real fast. And that was important to us. We had heaps of time up our sleeves, until we didn't. That point was when our record label was like, “Oh, you finally got a tour booked that might actually happen March, April 2022. Well, if you want to have your record out by then you need to have everything handed in to us by September 1.” And that was like June or July last year. [We’d] been working on these songs for ages, but they were nowhere near finished. Those last two months were just a sprint to finish them. But it was what we needed, right? It finally got us focused and got us back to the productive state that we normally have.
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