YOSSARI BABY
Alphaville
27th February 2026
Born out of The White Hotel, you might expect this particular baby to hum like a strip light over a wet car park. Instead, Yossari Baby’s second helpings are a neon-lit butcher’s shop: gaudy, frenetic, and gleefully overstocked with the latest buzzzzz from the slaughterhouse.
Here be beats with extra beef. Double-stacked vocals, delivered with a thick layer of ham. Talk of chicken dinners; the trio are back, and they’re packing meat. This is true in the production – drums and synths pound through this thing like girthy pistons – but also in the record’s lyrical preoccupations (should you hear them over guitars blistering enough to cook yer dinner).
Opener “Supercool” goads gym-bro machismo with innuendo (“Pump it up now, get bigger – you just might last forever!”), sharing its descending synth lines and plunge into base desire with the toothy “Young Carnivore”. “Eye of the Needle” loops the muscular mantra “I get up and dance my libido”, while the lyrics of “Porcelanosa” confess: “I’m just tryna get to Trinity, to lose my virginity!” But it’s not all dirty. Album highlight “Gravity” struggles against a more planetary pull from below.
New Brutality, then, fixates on flesh and the forces that act on it, internal and external. There’s more than a touch of the pioneering synthpop of the late 70s. In particular, “Warm Leatherette” by Daniel Miller and The Human League’s Reproduction, two October babies that considered the similarities between biology and machinery, pleasure and brutality, and heralded the UK’s New Wave.
The thing is, for two Brits and a French fashion designer who came together in Salford, Yossari Baby come across awfully… German. Maybe it’s the BDSM lyrics, the industrial synth leads, or those angry, angular, Krautrockian guitars, but together, they make a sound that could turn the M60 into a no-holds-barred autobahn should it collide with your cochlea during rush hour.
It’s all delivered with a wink of Northern music hall – arch, camp, and more than a bit ridiculous. Despite the statuesque shapes being cut on the cover, this is less voguing in a VW plant than a can-can at the SPAM factory. And unfortunately, like any meat market, the choice cuts go early. After a strong first half, the album’s late entries feel like leftover entrails – many of which, particularly the title track, are long, drawn-out, and lacking in nutritional value.
Although its more muscular first leg might’ve made a better EP, New Brutality achieves what it ought to: getting you up and moving your meat. And, as an introduction to the trio, it left this reviewer keen to attend a live show and see how the sausage gets made.