Ones to watch - Yonaka

The Guardian 0

An assured new EP leaves you in little doubt about this Brighton four-piece who plan to be ‘seriously big’

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.