Video: yOya, ‘The Bloom’

Daiana Feuer on May 22nd, 2018

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Eight years after the release of their debut album, “Nothing To Die,” yOya’s Alex Pfender and Noah Dietterich are ready to unleash their second full-length, “The Half Turn,” arriving July 20 via New Professor Records. Though the band put out an EP in 2013, “Go North,” and a few scattered singles, “The Half Turn” is the first thing the harmonizing folktronica duo have recorded since adding drummer Ian Meltzer to the fold.

Thematically, the new album centers around “the idea of looking back out of the corner of your eye even as you keep walking forward,” the band wrote via email. “The days keep coming, and these songs pick up and turn over strange pieces of our childhoods, struggle with the compromises of adulthood and … keep on going, looking ahead to the horizon.”

With a fun video, latest single “The Bloom” is about anticipation. They said, “It’s a little fretful and a little hopeful, killing time as we wait for something good to come along. And we’re sure it will come; we just don’t know yet what shape it will take.” Unlike previous visuals, the guys take a starring role in this one. Pfender says, “Most of our past videos rely on abstract art delivered via DIY machinations; ‘The Bloom’ features us more as actors, living and striving in the world that director Zach Johnston helped us to create. We kill time scrolling an endless, faceless social media feed; we pedal relentlessly uphill on a bike that doesn’t move; one way or another, we’re convinced that all this time spent is getting us somewhere. We never really do get anywhere new exactly. What seems to change is how we’re getting on in the little bubble of our world.”

Dietterich adds, “We sit with our instruments on the concrete banks of the L.A. River, but we don’t play them, we just scroll through an infinite blank feed, as the water flows through an infinite concrete channel. We exhaust ourselves pedaling bikes that go nowhere. It’s a derelict world that’s waiting on ‘The Bloom,’ studying itself in the mirror, though we still find joy at home together making music.”

||| Watch: “The Bloom”