The main thing that LE YORA learned while making their mesmeric debut album Labyrinth was trust. The quartet is a coming together of celebrated Berlin-based DJs and producers SOMMA, Jewels, yuma., and MAGNUS, and working together, they realized they were pushing themselves to new artistic heights. “We trust each other,” says SOMMA. “It’s a really collaborative project. We’re stronger as a team. We have a shared vision and a shared style.” The group began when Jewels and yuma. started making music together over Discord—their sonic horizons expanded when SOMMA and MAGNUS came into the fold. From there, what Jewels imagined as a tech-house project evolved into a debut where they mix club anthems with indie-inspired songwriting and Afro-house and techno production techniques. Lyrically, too, these are songs of a psychedelic flavor. “The lyrics flirt with religiosity, meta themes, some of the songs are about Matrix kind of things,” says MAGNUS. LE YORA has made the sort of album that transports you to another dimension. Let them take you through it track by track. “Labyrinth” yuma.: “This felt a good track to open up the album in the same way that ‘Tears’ felt like a good closing track to wrap up the album.” SOMMA: “The album is like a movie. It’s a story and [‘Labyrinth’ and ‘Tears’] felt a perfect opening and perfect closing. The whole album is more club-oriented and these two are a bit more down and chill, so it’s slowly introducing you to the sound and the idea, the concept of the whole album.” “Meet You There” Jewels: “This was one of the first songs. When we started the whole idea of the project, it was just me and yuma. We started one song, ‘So Lost,’ and then ‘Meet You There’ was the second track. We made it on Discord together. I was in Philadelphia and yuma. was in Frankfurt. We could share our screens and we made the song together.” SOMMA: “It also sounded a bit different. The vision for the project was not there yet. Then later on, when we all came together, the vision was there and this song changed quite a bit.” “Time” SOMMA: “This was a pretty epic session. We started it in Berlin around two years ago. It was the very last day of a camp we were at all together and we were the last ones in the studio, the four of us, and we just started jamming. I think it started out on the piano and it was a magical session.” Jewels: “It was epic because the night before we all went out clubbing and we were super tired the next day. We were just in the mood, going with the flow, and we put this together out of the blue.” “Ascension” Jewels: “I made this back in Philadelphia. I spent a week trying to write songs and I got really pissed off because I couldn’t write anything good. So I went to the gym and just steamed all my energy off, came back and somehow wrote this banger. It just came out of the blue.” MAGNUS: “I’m somewhat atheistic, and that’s what it’s about—the somewhat-ism. It was my grandmother who told me that the reason she was a Christian [came from] when she saw her father dying in the hospital. The lyrics are pretty much inspired by that, in the pre-chorus anyway. The rest of it is just flirting with religion because everyone that you see that has it seems to have a little bit more meaning in their lives.” SOMMA: “It’s an important track because Ascension is also the name of our label we’re launching with this project and we’re going to release our individual projects through it.” “More Than I Should Know” yuma.: “I started the main idea for this and sent it into our group chat. I wanted to use it for my own project, and after I sent it, Jewels was really amazed by the whole idea and was like, ‘Let’s use it for the project.’” Jewels: “We all came to the conclusion that it could be a big song.” MAGNUS: “The lyrics were inspired by The Matrix, the first film anyway, about when you see something that maybe you didn’t want to.” “Lucid” SOMMA: “I started this one three years ago, the idea of it, and then it was the same process—I sent it to the boys and they worked on it. The songwriting was there, then we worked a lot on the production. This one took a while but it feels very strong because it has this riff in the verse. It combines all the themes and songs of the album, consolidated basically in this whole track.” MAGNUS: “I’d had a few lucid dreams. It’s about the [idea] that if you were in a lucid dream and you kept having them, you would [be able to] fix things or have a better experience than real life—so when you woke up, it wasn’t so good.” “Solaris” Jewels: “I moved to Berlin last August and this is the first song I made in my new apartment. It just came out of me, so I gave it to the boys and MAGNUS wrote on it one night and they took it off from there.” MAGNUS: “The lyrics are inspired by [Stanisław Lem’s classic sci-fi novel] Solaris.” Jewels: “Writing this was inspired by the excitement of new opportunities on the horizon and being able to work on this project in person with all the boys. Since I was living in Philadelphia and working online, it was hard to get stuff done swiftly, so I was getting inspired by the opportunities that were to come.” “So Lost” yuma.: “I came up with a tom melody—the first version felt like you were in a jungle with a tom melody. I sent it to Jewels and he really liked it so we worked on it together.” Jewels: “It’s one of the songs that stayed the same throughout whole thing, we didn’t really change much. We fixed the production at the end, tweaked it, and rearranged it a bit. But the sounds and the writing stayed the same.” MAGNUS: “I did rerecord the vocals because I wrote and recorded the original in a kitchen and it was one of the worst-sounding kitchens: echoes, people having drinks and stuff.” “Blame” SOMMA: “We were all together in Berlin in the studio and it was pretty late. I opened a project on my laptop and played it through my MacBook speakers. It was this tom melody that is still there in the beginning. The basic idea was there and the boys heard it and we worked on it that night, pretty much finishing the main idea.” “Tears” MAGNUS: “This is very similar to ‘Labyrinth,’ that I had written.” yuma.: “He did the writing and the melodics of it. It started with one simple drum loop and a bassline and a piano, that was the whole idea with his vocals on it. I redid the drums to make it a bit more live-sounding.” SOMMA: “And way deeper. We were like, ‘We need to make it very deep and exaggerate the sub.’ We finished it together in the studio. It’s funny because a friend from Paris was there and he basically was sleeping on the couch while we were making this tune. He said it was his favorite on the record.”
Disc 1
Disc 2
More By LE YORA
- Woven
- Green Ring
- Late June