No Love Lost To Kindness is keenly indicative of where Yumi Zouma were at the time of writing, but that rain cloud overhead only reflected the best in themselves as artists.
Release date: January 30, 2026 | Nettwerk Music Group | Facebook | Instagram | Bandcamp
We all have impasses we have to reckon with, turning points where we have to come to decisions that will impact the future (and sometimes the past in some contexts). Some may be concealed a bit, and maybe you don’t even realize how pivotal something was to you and your life until well after the fact. Role-playing video games have spent decades trying to nail that feeling of impact and importance that players can enact on the worlds they build as part of the investment, but they come and go in our own real lives – whether with ease or great tumult – consistently and sometimes more often than we care for. I’m pretty firmly in that camp right now – please, I’m tired of being responsible and trying to make the right decisions all the time.
For Yumi Zouma, New Zealand’s premier pop rock band fashioned from cool air in long nights, No Love Lost To Kindness represents a turning point. Though it wasn’t consciously pursued, it represents a shift in sound and tone that’s unlike their previous work, which at this point is plentiful and prolific – this is LP number five after all. Instrumentation is bolder, things are more varied, and a couple firsts for the band can be heard on here, like did you know the band’s first ever key change can be found in the single “Phoebe’s Song” and was inspired by Macy Gray‘s venerable R&B/pop track “I Try”?
I don’t think anyone who knows the band well enough would say that this album betrays or reinvents the Yumi Zouma ethos, but it’s hard to not acknowledge that the vibes are different here. The band is usually content with playing in the gentle margins of music, meaning they don’t tend to be in-your-face, their music soundtracking the more easygoing moments of time or points of elation that deserve to be committed to memory. The quartet have been Going Through It™ the last year and a half though and it shows.
I think the most apparent difference between older work and No Love Lost To Kindness is the balance of energy. This LP has shifted it more toward the high registers with songs like “Bashville on the Sugar” which is a driving track almost contradictorily infatuated with feelings of contention and loss, playing out sonically like the mind of an anxious person juggling the elation of love and then the listlessness that comes post-breakup. Then on the other side of the scale is “Drag”, one of the moodiest tracks Yumi Zouma have ever laid down despite its brighter chorus. And those are just two of the singles.
“Chicago 2am” shimmers and shines in that classic Yumi Zouma way, but it still manages to paint a pensive picture among the allure it commands. It’s very open and airy, synths twinkling in the dark night sky backdrop of the track, and almost has a jazzy inflection with how instruments come and go like watching streetlights pass by while in a car. It’s sad without beating you over the head with it, kind of reminding me of a Trade Wind track a bit. “Did You See Her?” is more upfront with its feelings, bolstered by acoustic guitar and some of Christie Simpson’s best singing, pleasant yet emotive. It’s arguably the most ballad-like tune here and it’s monolithic as a result.
A good amount of No Love Lost To Kindness feels indebted to older times, but again in a subtle way, using more restraint than say, earlier beabadoobee albums (which I love as well). The album doesn’t scream nostalgic project (and better for that I think), but rather bends and contorts the Yumi Zoumaisms so they’re pointed backward just slightly enough for those in the know – who grew up in the ’90s and early 2000s – to pick up on it. It’s heavier than the usual, if not in pace and tone, than certainly in theme, but if that isn’t indicative of the times, I don’t know what is.
The most perplexing thing about the album is the title. No Love Lost To Kindness implies a lot, but none of it certain to me – that’s fine. What is clear to me is Yumi Zouma were burdened while making it – burdened by difficulties and the challenges of being part of something or even themselves, so much so that an apparent tentative title for this album at one point, joking or not, was ‘Tunnel To Hell’. There’s a needle in each song to prick yourself with, but there’s no maliciousness, simply a result of embodying all the malaise of time and life into something people can identify with. Some may call stewing in the emotions of it all a pity party, but I’m more apt to say it’s simply part of being human and that’s what makes this album a refreshing listen in the moment, and one of Yumi Zouma‘s best yet.
