Yur Mum’s new single ‘What Do You Want?’ has a more personal approach and talks about dealing with anxiety. Is there a specific incident that led to the song being written?
Yur Mum: A combination of them. I think most people can relate that we try to contain our feelings, and that can lead to more pain.
Specificity is a sure way to connect with an audience, but, understandably, certain answers here may evade details. Have you ever overshared via lyrics before, or would you say you’d like to push your vulnerability further?
Yur Mum: For us, writing lyrics can be therapeutic. A means of letting out all sorts of feelings, good and bad. This is probably not a recipe to commercial success, but that’s why we find refuge in rock music. We don’t feel any constraints in terms of oversharing. Still, perhaps some lyrics might sound vague or abstract because English is our second language or simply because we like them to seem vague and abstract.
Well, despite the subject matter we do get to have a lot of fun watching you at gigs. The leap from trio to duo seems somewhat effortless. The Lips Can Kill tour being evidence of this. Any concrete word as to there being a ‘sequel’ this year?
Yur Mum: Thanks, we took our chances performing as a duo and as much as we might say we were confident it’d work, we didn’t know what to expect from the audiences. Our first gig with NMA was a ‘baptism by fire’, but the Lips Can Kill tour was definitely the main trial. Speaking of a potential second tour, we live in an age of sequels and trilogies, so there’s always a possibility of another one, plus we had a great time with all the bands, and we feel a special bond was established.
There really was a feeling of you guys having each other’s backs, especially with the fracas behind the Highbury and Islington gig. They wouldn’t let Tokyo Taboo use their dancing pole, right? How did you convince them to let it in finally?
Yur Mum: Not that anyone could stop Dolly, but all the bands were supporting Tokyo Taboo, and we would’ve cancelled the event if we had to.
She’s a force of nature, and your teamwork really was in evidence at the show as well as online. At the risk of seeming like a sad fanboy, your effort during the shows I filmed never dipped lower than 99 per cent. Do you feel more pressure to be that energetic now that you’re a duo?
Yur Mum: No. We believe we had the same level of energy before. The three of us had genuine chemistry on stage. The truth is we love to perform, and it’s absolutely no effort to us, the difference is that now we have more space to fill on stage.
There is no gap between the power of the record or what you do on stage, that’s for sure. By the way, I noticed that you have a video on your YouTube that features the ‘Birds of Prey’ comic book movie. Your song ‘Crazy’ is on the soundtrack, am I right?
Yur Mum: We’re actually flattered that pretty much everyone who watched the video thought it was official, but we did it for fun. When we recorded ‘Crazy’, we used to talk about how the track would be perfect for a Joker or a Harley Quinn movie trailer, so we did it ourselves. WB still hasn’t sued us, so it’s all good.
Ha! Fantastic. Anything you wanna plug before we end this interview?
Yur Mum: Well, we got a new video directed by the awesome John Clay on our YouTube Channel, please watch it and subscribe to our channel. We want to invite your readers to follow us on social media and that they can also subscribe to our mailing list on yurmum.com. We’ll keep you posted about our upcoming shows, festivals and future releases. We got a lot of things lined up for 2020, and we expect it to be an even better year for Yur Mum.
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