Manc agitators press the big beats button
Who?
Drawing on no wave, post-punk and new wave flavours, Yossari Baby are a Manchester three-piece made up of primary songwriter Tim Schiazza, guitarist Mark Javin, and French fashion designer-turned vocalist Lucie Forest. Together they craft genre-hopping tracks built on big electronic beats, gothic rhythms and dirty rock guitar, never once settling on a single idea.
Why Yossari Baby?
There’s a nostalgic pick ’n’ mix quality to Yossari Baby’s sound, a selection of the sweetest parts of 1980s and 90s synthpop, thrown in with absolute disregard for convention. Take ‘Inferiority Complex’, the title track of their latest album, which comes on like The Sisters Of Mercy messing around with synthwave, while ‘Again’ is a subtle take on This Mortal Coil’s immersive dreampop, and ‘It’s All Up’ has the jittery playfulness of an Oingo Boingo/B-52’s supergroup. But they also incorporate contemporary social critique, namely in slamming the development and gentrification of Manchester since the early 2000s.
Tell Us More…
Yossari Baby weren’t so much formed as forced into being. During the pandemic, Schiazza was asked by his friend Austin Collins – who penned the official biography of Mark E Smith – to put together a livestream music event at The White Hotel in Salford. Schiazza and Forest decided to create something new, weird and representative of Manchester’s changing landscape. The broadcast went down well, and as soon as The White Hotel started taking bookings again, the pair were asked to perform under their new guise. Since then, they have played at an album launch party for Acid Klaus, and gained notoriety for their wild live performances, for which Forest dons a mask as “the resident Mannequin De Marseille”. Their first live tour awaits.
‘Inferiority Complex’ is out via Bandcamp
