“This is our fourth album, so we wanted to pivot slightly, create more extreme versions of songs,” Charlie Ryder says. Remote and in-person sessions in studios in Wellington, Florence, New York, Los Angeles, and London all played a role, and Yumi Zouma brought in new collaborators from different disciplines to broaden their sound. What began in fits and starts became a committed practice again as Yumi Zouma dug through demos from as early as 2018 to collaborate on and make relevant to the peculiar moment in time the band, and world, was experiencing, memorialized on album opener “Give It Hell.” By September 1st, 2021, the album needed to be finished, regardless of whether they’d be able to tour it or even meet to record together. Without looming tour dates driving them to release new music, the prolific band found themselves at a standstill. You might assume that while some artists have struggled to rethink their processes during a pandemic, Yumi Zouma would be perfectly suited to the COVID-19 lockdown, but the opposite proved to be true. A process of curation, revisiting the past and making it relevant to the present.” Their new album, Present Tense, is the product of those efforts, a work Christie Simpson describes as “a gallery wall displaying these different moments in each of our lives. Yumi Zouma’s Josh Burgess likens the band’s songwriting process to gardening, “Someone brings in a seed and through collaboration, it grows into a song that is vastly different from its original form.” Like any garden, this one requires dedicated tending, a practice that seems rather inconvenient if not straight-up difficult, considering the fact that the four members live in disparate parts of the world – calling New York, London, and New Zealand home – but long-distance has always been a feature of their songwriting process, not a bug.
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