Yoste Walks Us Through His New EP ‘Never The Same’

Allow Brisbane based songwriter and producer Yoste to walk you through his long-awaited EP project ‘Never The Same’.

Featuring lead single ‘Violet’, Yoste recorded the six-track collection between Los Angeles (Valley Underground Studio) and Brisbane (Yoste’s personal studio) and worked with acclaimed producer Konstantin Kersting (Tones And I, The Jungle Giants) to bring the final recorded version to life. The young artist specialises in immersive alt-pop that expertly balances vulnerability with confidence as he explores intimate themes of mental illness, societal norms and more.

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Read below to hear about each track of the EP in Yoste’s own words!

Violet:

This song contains some of my riskier lines maybe… a comment on the seeming status symbol of depression and anxiety in pop culture these days. It’s not to say those things aren’t huge problems, of course they are and I write about them often, but it’s more about the temptation within all of us to wear those things as a badge of honour rather than something we can and must try to deal with. Give young people in particular their teeth back! Let’s not fall victim to our own heads. We can be self-critical and amazed and ingenious and fantastic and depressed. Not just depressed. That’s the idea anyway. 

Let me swim:

A self-critical look at friendship and letting go. Equal parts sarcastic and regretful. In general, I think it’s a natural part of life that we lose or grow apart from most of our friends over time. Only a very few relationships will survive our whole lives, and that’s ok. It’s a genuine feeling of mine, however I’ll admit the initial concept, title and some of the lyrics for the song arose from a much more petulant place which I’m fully aware is unlikely to endear me to people haha. Essentially, I act like an absolute child when I go swimming in the ocean, tumbling and frolicking about, somersaulting etc. This has led to multiple encounters with lifeguards telling me to be more sensible, and therefore I now have a petty feud with them – I’m happy they exist of course but I tend to avoid them where I can and want them to leave me alone, they’re not the sea police haha. In any case, that’s where the title comes from. It’s the most light-hearted track on the record. 

Friends:

This song speaks to a friendship I had with a guy when I was younger who had a lot of attributes of someone I wanted to be. He was confident, uninhibited and very charismatic. He wrote music that was much better than mine and was probably better liked than me but I didn’t resent him for it, I admired him. Yet as we grew up and began to move on with our lives he took various turns and spiralled in a way that revealed the downsides or costs of his personality. I felt like I had failed him and resented myself a little bit for achieving things we both would have expected him to be the one to achieve. Ultimately, I had to move on. The song is harsher than our real relationship but it’s from a genuine place.

Coastline:

A song about using songs as a crutch for communication and self-expression. Ironically maybe my favourite of the bunch.

Lungs:

Perhaps the most serious track lyrically on the EP, lungs is essentially an anthem for self-acceptance, but not in an “I’m choosing to love myself” upbeat way necessarily. Much more in the vein of “without my darkest aspects what am I? There’s no one without the other. It is what it is. I am myself. There’s no choice.” 

Oxford:

A heartsick ballad about recognising your faults, fear that you won’t change. Recognising you were wrong, afraid of the consequences.

The EP is out everywhere now!