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Mar 14, 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 video for the EP’s “In Camera.” Pavel Brenner directed the video, which centers on a teenage romance and features lots of dancing and synchronized swimming. Watch it below.

Christie Simpson of Yumi Zouma had this to say about the video in a press release: “Pavel’s video, and the song itself, are based on a feeling, a mood, a sense of nostalgia. It’s a tandem feeling of hopefulness and hopelessness, teenage coming-of-age awkwardness, bold and sometimes silly expressions of adoration (be them requited or otherwise), the bittersweet pain of growing up and crushing hard (but finding a joy in it all), the innocence and purity of adolescence, and the realness of life presented in a hyperreal way, with a hyperreal focus on the banal and familiar.”

Pavel had this to say: “My goal was to take the audience on an awkward date magical journey. There was the potential to be both fun and intimate, and I’m glad the band responded to the idea with a ‘hell yeah.’”

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.

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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