Yonaka grab your attention and don't let go on Don't Wait 'Til Tomorrow

It could have felt heavy – YONAKA’s debut has been highly anticipated across punk scenes and indie rock spaces alike – but this is a band with ambitions far higher than even the greatest of expectations. From the record’s opening seconds until the very end it is explosive, soaring, and entirely unique – there’s nobody worth comparing them to. YONAKA are here to exist in their own realm.

The album confidently moves between playfulness, tenderness, and grit – often all in one song, as with stand-out tracks “Lose Our Heads” and “Wake Up”. The combination of Jarvis’ gorgeous, versatile vocals, clever lyricism, and the killer beats provided by drummer Robert Mason creates something unwaveringly epic.

Even in the record’s comparatively calm moments it is a dramatic and exciting beast – in “Guilty (For Your Love)”, the music slows down whilst Jarvis’ singing speeds up in a frantic, not-quite-desperate fashion. This split tempo serves to mirror the complicated, messy, beautiful, aching nature of human relationships. It speaks to the situations when the love is not entirely healthy yet is somehow healing – it’s causing hurt but sustaining you simultaneously.

The album’s most vulnerable spots contrast nicely with its most frisky – “Guilty” is followed by “Rockstar”, a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the clichéd rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Equally, the title track – about “reaching out to someone, about knowing it’s okay to not be okay”, according to Jarvis – is coupled with the gritty, spitting “Punch Bag”.

These jarring transitions aren’t awkward though – they’re sharp, and show off the band’s incredible capacity as well as their understanding of the world they are making music in. It’s jarring with a purpose – as Jarvis sings “ignorance is not bliss to me” repeatedly over a dirty riff in “Awake”, she’s making everyone pay attention. She holds the listener by the throat for the rest of the record, and by the penultimate track, “Wake Up”, just before she’s ready to let them go, spits that “shit just got real”. If you weren’t paying attention before, you are now.