Seize the Power

This mixtape began with the title track. It was January 2020 and Yonaka singer Theresa Jarvis was feeling low, wrapped up in what everyone else was doing and losing sight of what she wanted. Walking into the Brighton rock quartet’s rehearsal room one day, she heard the track’s crunching riff and tribal stomp and the words came flooding out. “I was like, ‘That’s it!’” Jarvis tells Apple Music. “We all knew that was the change.” Their 2019 debut album Don’t Wait 'Til Tomorrow introduced a group with an anthemic swagger, and here they up the ante with a collection of soaring choruses and explosive rock dynamism. On their first record, they recorded every song they had; for Seize the Power, they wrote six days a week through lockdown and ended up with 100 tracks to choose from. “This is the most excited we’ve ever felt in music,” says Jarvis. “I feel so proud of what we’ve done.” Here, Jarvis, drummer Robert Mason, guitarist George Edwards, and bassist and keyboardist Alex Crosby take us through Yonaka’s bold new era, track by track.

“Ordinary”
Robert Mason: “I think I suggested this as the opener because it’s got a piano intro and I was like, ‘It’d be kind of cool to start the mixtape with that.’ We just did it and rolled with it. The intro was originally a separate part of the track; I think it was in the chorus.”
Theresa Jarvis: “The song was starting really big at first and then we were like, ‘OK, let’s strip it right down so it’s just piano and vocals.’”

“Seize the Power”
TJ: “I feel like we’re all two versions of ourselves. We’re this vulnerable one who’s scared and likes to feel comfortable and maybe not break out of their self, who gets told ‘no’ all their life and doesn’t do anything. Then there’s a thing inside of you, which is what you really are, what you start off with when you’re born, which is this absolute powerhouse that wants to conquer the world. This song’s about unlocking that power inside yourself, how you feel when everything’s going well and you feel strong.”

“Get Out”
TJ: “It’s like a sexy little seedy dance tune, but it’s still got the grit. It’s based on the movie Girl, Interrupted. We watched it and then jumped straight onto the Casio, which is broken, and that’s what gave it that warbly noise in the beginning. I just love how people fall in love with danger.”

“Raise Your Glass”
TJ: “This is such a joyous song. It’s about your journey—where you’ve come from to where you are now and how you have to fuck up and you have to make mistakes to learn. I don’t know anyone in the world who hasn’t fucked up, because that’s the only way you learn how to not do something again. The chorus is almost two vocal choruses, and so it was hard to decide which one to sing when we played it live.”
George Edwards: “It was really nice, this song, because it was the first song we all wrote together after I started coming back to Brighton again after lockdown.”

“Clique” (feat. FEVER 333)
TJ: “This is a big fuck-you song to people who are always in your face, chatting shit, and you’re like, ‘I’ve had it with your problems, I need to focus on myself.’ People drain you with themselves sometimes.”

“Greedy”
TJ: “This is about people taking—take, take, take. I think I’d just got off the phone and realized how much money people take just from everything. People take advantage any chance they get, and you’ve got to stop them quickly, because otherwise you’ll never get out of it. You need to respect yourself and put yourself in a position where people don’t think they can take advantage of you.”
Alex Crosby: “I also like that it’s kind of like a nursery rhyme.”

“Call Me a Saint”
TJ: “This is touching on mental health. The more you bow down to it and get into that hole and shadow away from it, you get worse. I wanted ‘Call Me a Saint’ to be a song that flips it on the head to be like, ‘You’re strong and incredible for being able to do this every day and getting through all the troubles that you have.’ I want to praise myself for it and praise anyone who struggles because you beat yourself up and you speak to yourself really horribly for feeling something that’s out of your control.”

“Anthem”
RM: “I think it was quite an interesting approach without having drums and stuff on there. A lot of our choruses are quite big, anthemic, very direct, and this is, ‘How can we have a chorus that sounds massive but doesn’t necessarily use big guitars and massive drums and stuff?’ It was quite fun to try and figure that out.”