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May 22, 2019 By Christopher Roberts Yumi Zouma

New Zealand indie-pop band Yumi Zouma released a new EP, EP III, last September via Cascine. Now they have shared a brand new song, “Bruise,” that’s a standalone single and is a little bit more electronic and club-ready than their usual fare. Listen below,

The band has this to say about the song in a press release: “On EP III, we were literally finishing tracks the day before they had to be turned in and uploaded. This helped us to realize that we could release our next songs in a more direct way, and put ‘Bruise’ out independently. The origins of ‘Bruise’ were steeped in loss, but the track has become a beacon of optimism for us. We started writing the instrumental after our great friend Sam told us he was leaving the band and moving to Serbia. We were all distraught until Josh said, ‘Cheer me up guys - let’s write a song for Nelly Furtado.’ Nelly never replied but we came up with a smash.”

EP III was the follow-up to Yumi Zouma’s sophomore album, Willowbank, which was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2017. Previously they shared the EP’s first single, “In Camera,” which was our #2 Song of the Week. Then they shared another song from it, the wonderfully titled “Crush (It’s Late, Just Stay),” which was also one of our Songs of the Week. Then they shared a video for “In Camera,” as well as a video for the EP’s “Crush (It’s Late, Just Stay).”

As its title suggests, EP III was the third and final part of a trilogy of EPs that started in 2014. The band issued this previous press release statement about the EP: “There is something really special about the EP format. It’s been so long since we worked on one that we all had forgotten how fun and liberating they can be. This EP, both in its material and how it was written and recorded, feels really close to EP I and II. Spread again between three countries, bouncing endless revisions of a song until it’s right, falling asleep on FaceTime trying to write lyrics together and the exhilaration of waking up to NEW SONG VERSION 5 - it threw us back to how we worked on material when we thought no one would ever listen. We’ve completed our EP family. It’s the little sibling none of us had growing up and none of us knew we could love so much.”

Read our 2017 interview with Yumi Zouma on Willowbank.

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