Image credit: Paige Margulies
Following the release of ‘Hole’ and the BBC 6 Music supported ‘Alive’, Nashville-based bedroom pop project Yot Club have released ‘Deer Island’, the third and final single to be lifted from his incoming ‘Santolina’ EP which is due out Jan 14th on Nice Guys Records. Out now, ‘Deer Island’ is a nostalgic yet charming and warm single, led by Ryan Kaiser’s recognisable and haunting vocals. With a delicate indie pop and summer rock vibe, the American singer and producer takes us once again into his own world. Stream it here.
Talking about ‘Deer Island’, Yot Club says: “Deer Island is a tiny island with no residents. You can see it from the coast and I’ve always thought it looked super creepy and liminal. One night I read about a guy that used to live there alone in a shack. He would paddle out to fishermen and tourists and sing for them and they would throw him tips. Everyone referred to him as the hermit of Deer Island and he was apparently very well-liked throughout town. I just thought it was a cool story and it shows that if you do what you love, people will almost always be supportive even if it’s weird.”
Ryan Kaiser’s Yot Club project stems from a diverse array of influences and offers a unique and recognizable brand of vibrant, sunny pop-rock. Since 2019, Yot Club has released three EPs and more than thirty tracks. Taking a simplified approach to recording, intentionally working within his restrictions of owning one microphone, Ryan boosts his creativity. His sound reflects a pretty summer vibe, using distorted vocals, lo-fi beats, warm effects-laden guitars and analogue synth melodies.
This year marks a new turning point in his whole project: surfing on the wave of “YKWIM?”s worldwide TikTok success and the accompanying streaming boost (“YKWIM?” now counts over 100 million streams on Spotify), Yot Club has worked on a new six-track EP, ‘Santolina’. Funkier than ever, it will be the second EP Yot Club releases with Nice Guys Records following 2020’s ‘Nature Machine’. On ‘Santolina’, Kaiser presents a record not avoidant of but rather in conversation with all those things that make modern America a hulking, unsustainable—but somehow still beautiful—weirdo wasteland: TikTok, corporatism, beige sandstone homes, private desert communities, manicured lawns, suburban surrealism. All in between are the people trying to make sense of it all and Yot Club is right there with you.
The record’s six tracks map the terrifying, carefully-manicured haze of American suburbia, based in part on Kaiser’s childhood spent in the suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi. “The suburbs are a shitty place to be from, but they’re not at the same time,” says Kaiser. “I was fortunate to be from a place where kids were playing baseball in the streets and building clubs in the woods, but as you get older, you gain a bleaker perspective on everything. That’s the whole vibe of the EP really.” The title nods to the proposed ‘Santolina’ development in New Mexico, which promises flawless suburban streets and identical houses while sucking local rivers dry to sustain the desert community.
Follow Yot Club:
Twitter / Instagram / Spotify / Soundcloud
