Tune-Yards want people to find power in Heartbreak

Tune-Yards, the experimental music project of California-based couple Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner, has been pushing sonic boundaries for over a decade.

In 2012, Tune-Yards played a memorable show in Aotearoa that left fans buzzing about their boundary-breaking performance.

"I remember me and Noah and Matt, our two saxophone players, all wore or I should say grew mustaches for New Zealand," Brenner, who plays the bass and co-produces the group's genre-defying sound, tells Music 101. "It was a packed show. We were sweating hard. Our mustaches were dripping wet with sweat."

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Now, the New England duo is preparing to release their sixth studio album, Better Dreaming, on 16 May.

The album has been described by their record label 4AD as "ferocious in its invocation of self-love, of collective action, of dance floor liberation, ego-death deliverance, and a future we could all thrive in".

Brenner says their 3-year-old child, whose vocals feature on the album, took on the unofficial role of producer and was "very decisive" about what songs he wanted in this record.

"He would play a lot of the demos and he'd get really attached to them. So it was really helpful because you'd see him move his body and react right away, and so you're like, okay, this is working well."

Singer and multi-instrumentalist Garbus says although they had less time and money than before with a toddler on their hands, they embraced the chance to be "less precious and less self-critiquing" in their art.

In Limelight, which is their toddler's favourite, Garbus pondered whether it was okay to sing about babies being all right when we live in a difficult time.

"For me, I probably would have thrown it [the song] out months before but he kept wanting to hear it again and again and again. I think we did really take that into consideration on some kind of essential level that it was a catchy song and that it was a danceable song, which we love to give to people…

"I think I was getting too analytical, too self-critical about it. I've always thought kids are really good for that, to just say like, hey, stop thinking so much about these overly complex ideas and get back to basics."

The duo's involvement in film and TV scores (Boots Riley's 2018 film Sorry to Bother You, and 2023 drama I'm a Virgo) helped them overcome the challenges of worrying about expectations and enjoy the process of creative music-making, Garbus says.

"I mean, I've had tears in here, rage in here. The title track Better Dreaming, I remember just thinking 'I need to sing as if these are backup singers from, like, Banshee backup singers'."

"I've heard my voice do things that it hasn't done in Tune-Yards before [while recording for film and TV scores] and I think that really influenced this record, because we were kind of hearing ourselves do things that we hadn't done before for someone else's project…

"We were just in a real zone, I mean, an exhausted zone. I think I remember saying, I can't imagine writing any more music and then somehow from the fumes of our creativity, we kept going and recorded these songs.”

The first song on the album – Heartbreak – delves in to the personal and "global heart breaks" people experience in an enlightening way, Garbus says.

"I think instead of waiting for those [heartbreaks] to be over, to find power within them somehow, that like actually 'bring it on, because I'm going to be more human and I'm going to find more energy and more fire in myself and more drive to make the world what I want it to be through heartbreak'.

"For some reason that felt like a really energetic change for me.

"That's what I hope the record does as a whole is to give people energy through reality, that we don't want to be in a fantasy, but through reality to really find energy to continue on."