***Following 2024’s I Can’t Have It All, Bay Area indie pop band Yea-Ming and The Rumours return with their fourth studio album, Residue. With Yea-Ming’s signature heart-tugging lyrics and Nico-esq voice, she continues to explore the rawness of human experience and emotions. When I Can’t Have It All signified a time of change and transition for Yea-Ming, Residue embraces the reset; the examination of reality after a storm.
With the help of long-time collaborator Eóin Galvin (Hoxton Mob, Readyville) on lead guitar and lap steel, Ryli colleagues Rob Good (The Goods, Ryli) on bass and Luke Robbins (Ryli, R.E. Seraphin) on drums, Yea-Ming takes us on a journey of regrowth, reflection and exploration.
In Treasury of Loved Ones, Yea-Ming explores the permanence of memory, or what appears to be permanent even as time moves on and erases moments out of our lives. It’s a sweet and sad ode to remembering our loved ones, especially those we have lost to in time and in death. In Sweet Opiate (with hints of The Cardigans), Yea-Ming dares to dive into intimacy and its vulnerabilities. In the experimental Paper Doll, she admits inauthenticity in a world where one has been taught to please everyone around them to survive. And in Fine Afternoon, we are confronted with the reality of a tainted rebirth as Yea-Ming sings “in this life renewed, you’re my residue” (here we find our album title) and we remember that resets are never clean.
The Rumours explore a little bit musically this time as well; with uncharacteristic danceable numbers in the vulnerable and sensuous St. Etienne-like Sweet Opiate and the reflective Fine Afternoon, as well as noisier fuzz-driven guitars in Treasury of Loved Ones, Cold and Paper Doll. If that sounds worrisome to long time listeners, those tracks are also heavily infused with the old stuff like Eóin’s eerily sensitive lap steel playing, and plenty of hooks in the melodies. And there are certainly a handful of other tracks like Uncommon Dreaming and Cheap Thrill where Yea-Ming pursues her natural and familiar inclination to the 90s indie side of tender, melodic folk-pop, heavily influenced by bands like Yo La Tengo, Camera Obscura and Jesus and Mary Chain.
While Good serves as the band’s skilled recording engineer, this is a Yea-Ming production through and through, her vision realized through exploring texture while mixing the album at home. Overall, Residue is about the overbearing nature of memory (remembering and forgetting), embracing the coarseness of love, intimacy and regret. It’s admittedly a heavy blend, glued together by the honey voice of Yea-Ming.
