Moodie

In February 2018 Sub Pop announced it had signed Yuno, a 27-year-old from Jacksonville, Florida, who had been putting out songs made in his bedroom since 2010. Ishmael Butler of Shabazz Palaces, who does A&R for the label, had found him on SoundCloud. Moodie, six songs in 25 minutes, came out on June 15. The label’s credit is short: written, performed and produced by Yuno. The title is his surname, and by his account it also describes the songs, which cover “all the different feelings you have at the end of a relationship”.

He made it the way he had made everything before it: at home, playing every instrument, recording and producing it himself. He also shot his own press photos, directed the videos and made the cover art. Pink has been his favourite colour since sixth grade, and the LP’s Loser edition came on pink vinyl. Some of the songs went back three or four years. After signing he tried to come up with something different for the label, then went back to what he had been working on. Every song he finished went on the EP, he said, because nothing else got finished, and he chose the running order himself. They were also the first songs he had ever had properly mixed and mastered. He traces the mix back to the soul, reggae and dancehall his parents played (they are Jamaican, by way of London), to the AFI and Rancid CDs friends passed him, and to hip-hop old and new.

“Amber” opens with a spoken greeting in Jamaican patois, peace and blessings and no room for negativity, through a filtered voice. Pitchfork picked out clinking glass, a ballpark-style organ and siren-like yelps around a chorus that asks for an ambulance. “No Going Back”, the first single, came with a video he directed and starred in, about wandering around, in his words, “definitely sure about where I don’t want to be”. Sub Pop’s notes put his voice over a buoyant bass line, and the song has a fuzzy guitar solo near the end. Pitchfork made it a Best New Track and NPR an early pick for song of the summer. “Fall In Love” goes the other way: almost ambient for Bandcamp Daily, with a rumbling bass line and a Sade-like delivery, and built on a melancholy piano for Northern Transmissions.

“Why For” is the loud one, with squealing guitars that Sub Pop compared to Wavves and a delivery that Bandcamp Daily heard as part hip-hop, part Robert Smith. By that account it is a mutual break-up song, and its video, also his, is in his words “a collage of memories, drifting through different moods”. “So Slow” is the longest track at 5:48, which Pitchfork heard as chimes over a hopping bass line, with the lyric “time heals so slow”. “Galapagos”, the closer, starts on a line about needing time to cope, and Exclaim noted that he raps on it. Loud and Quiet heard a Frank Ocean-like ease there and Animal Collective across the record. Sub Pop’s own notes had already placed the first single between Tame Impala, Frank Ocean and Len’s “Steal My Sunshine”.

The reviews were good and agreed on the range. Exclaim gave it 9 out of 10 and likened it to a Long Island iced tea, sweet melodies over sour lyrics. Loud and Quiet, at 8, called it a “bold opening statement” in which each track heads somewhere new. Pitchfork, at 7.4, read it as a breakup record that ends in self-discovery and named “So Slow” the standout, though it liked his cavernous vocal effect less on “Why For”. Northern Transmissions, at 7.5, admired the sounds and harmonies but found the writing static, with “So Slow”, Pitchfork’s favourite, barely moving after its first minute.

That split over “So Slow” is the record in small. Yuno built Moodie alone, kept every song he finished and set the order himself, so the range is his, and so are the songs critics found too static. The singles carry it: “No Going Back” has the hook and the solo, “Why For” the noise, and both came out of the same bedroom as the rest. He had not been on a stage since high school when, that April, he opened for Twin Shadow with two Jacksonville musicians he had met online and saw in person for the first time at rehearsal. His first full-length, Blest, took until May 2025.