What does Yon Loader sound like?

Shades of emo and punk peeking out behind a wall of melodic alt-rock songwriting.

The review of ‘Yon Loader’ by Yon Loader

New Zealand has a habit of producing musicians that bring a rawness to their music and Yon Loader is no exception. The self-titled debut album is a project helmed by James Stutley. James wrote and built the album but a wide rotating cast of collaborators joined to support the project. All these different secondary voices and artistic twists bring variations on a theme. That theme is emo-punk rock but after you’ve written the cathartic diary entry to get rid of the angst.

What I mean by this is that Yon Loader’s sound is plugged. It is fully rocking with big guitar moments and surges of big drums and cymbal crashes. Sometimes even the vocalists explode into an emotional purge too. The songwriting and production lean into an emptying, submerged melancholy though which means the basslines or big walls of sound you hear on most emo-punk records don’t exist here. Take the excellent single ‘Tied Up In’ as a great example. The bass is largely cello-based – and the cello plays that role several times across the album. It then makes the jangled electric guitar fuzz lighter, airier and unmoored. It is a clever design because you get the full band effect when all the instruments sync up for big chorus surges or bridges. When things are quieter though, Yon Loader revels in the space a lack of bass creates.

Despite there being 11 tracks on the album, there are quite a few short ditties. Four are well under two minutes, with a fifth only just getting over it. ‘Another Month’ is a short meditative passing of time with spacious guitar and vocals. ‘In The Glow’ is a hazy Rasputina-esque ballad with husky vocals and brooding cello hiding beneath marching drums. It’s a beautiful piece but over too soon. ‘In The Way’ feels like a nugget of a bigger track or a demo of something to come, whilst ‘Leaving Now’ is a short instrumental pause for breath. The best short song is a rustic guitar and vocal only ‘Two Good Things’. There is something unruly about the dualling vocal delivery that rasps and gasps over the lonely guitar at pace. Its bedroom rock at its best.

This leaves meatier full-band rock tracks scattered across the album to carry a lot of weight. Thankfully, the longer tracks largely all hit home runs. ‘Another Year’ hits the perfect stride of anthemic chorus and catchy verses that pair things back to an emotional damage-inducing minimum. The mixture of understated lead vocals and punkish backing vocals shouting angrily in the background stands out too. ‘Waiting Up’ is a percussive bone crush of tom drums and poignant guitar riffs with sprinkles of optimism. ‘The Doubt’ is beautifully melodic and driving with an incredibly satisfying guitar solo turned secondary riff element running across the second half of the song. It sounds carefree and breezy in some ways but like most of the lyrics across the album, Yon Loader is diarising all kinds of deep feelings. The album closes with the slowed-down punk dirge of ‘Dust Settles Down’. The plodding four-chord motif limps through the verses to then explode into a ramshackle blaze of worry and uncertainty for the choruses. It showcases the at times rigid-by-design approach to songwriting that James brings to Yon Loader and why it can be so powerful in practice.

It took me a while to click with Yon Loader’s debut album. Part of that is due to its uneven structure, as the back half of the album has a lot of short tracks that break the flow up somewhat. When left to the fully formed songs Yon Loader shines best as it gives James room to breathe and lets ideas and melodies spin around the listeners brain. This is indie meets emo with punk aspirations and whilst not everything hits the mark, when it does, it hits hard.

Recommended track: The Doubt

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