tUnE-yArDs

Origin New Canaan, Connecticut, United States Genres Art pop, worldbeat, indie pop, lo-fi Years active 2006–present Tune-Yards (stylized as tUnE-yArDs)[1] is the American, Oakland, California–based music project of Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner. Garbus's music draws from an eclectic variety of sources and uses elements such as loop pedals, ukulele, vocals, and lo-fi percussion.[2] Tune-Yards’ 2011 album Whokill was ranked the number one album of that year in The Village Voice's annual Pazz and Jop critics’ poll.[3] The album Nikki Nack was released in 2014, with its first single, "Water Fountain", being picked up by Google Pixel in 2016 for an advertising campaign. The album I Can Feel You Creep into My Private Life was released in January 2018. At the same time, Tune-Yards provided an atmospheric score for the sci-fi film Sorry to Bother You.

Born in 1979, Garbus was raised in New York City and in New Canaan, Connecticut.[4][5] She attended Smith College. She was a puppeteer for the Sandglass Theater in Vermont[6] and lived in Montreal where she played ukulele in the band Sister Suvi with guitarist Patrick Gregoire and drummer Nico Dann.[7][8] Merrill's sister Ruth Garbus is also a musician who has played solo and in the band Happy Birthday.[9] After releasing her first Tune-Yards album in 2008, she moved to Oakland, California, where her partner in Tune-Yards, Nate Brenner, also lives.[5][6] The first Tune-Yards album, Bird-Brains (stylized as BiRd-BrAiNs) was originally self-released by Garbus on recycled cassette tape. It was recorded using only a handheld voice recorder.[10] A limited edition vinyl was released in June 2009, via the Portland-based imprint Marriage Records.[11] In July 2009, it was announced that Tune-Yards had signed to 4AD, and a limited edition pressing of Bird-Brains was released on August 17, 2009.[12] A full worldwide release followed on November 16, 2009 (and November 17 in North America). The autumn 2009 pressing was remastered at Abbey Road Studios by Christian Wright, and includes two new bonus tracks: "Want Me To" and "Real Live Flesh." A second album, Whokill (stylized as w h o k i l l), was released on April 19, 2011.[13] A single from it, "Bizness", came out in February 2011. It was produced by Garbus and engineered by Eli Crews at New, Improved Studios in Oakland, California. Applying the live approach to Garbus' studio work for the first time, Garbus works with bass player Nate Brenner, who co-wrote some of the album's songs. Comparing the act to Sonic Youth, Frontier Psychiatrist said, "if Bird-Brains was Garbus' Evol, a record bursting with musical ideas that attempted to subvert the notion of song, who kill is Garbus' Sister, a record that embraces the traditional pop song as a vehicle to convey those ideas."[14][15] The album as well as singles "Bizness" and "Gangsta" received mention on many top 2011 album and song lists, including Time,[16][17] Rolling Stone,[18][19] Spin,[20] and the New York Times.[21] In early 2012, the Village Voice's annual "Pazz and Jop" poll of critics named Whokill the No. 1 album of 2011.[22] The song "Fiya" is featured on a 2010 commercial for the Blackberry Torch, while the song "Gangsta" has been used in the television shows Orange Is the New Black, Letterkenny, Weeds and The Good Wife and the song "Bizness" was used in Season 3 of Transparent. Garbus started recording material for her third LP during the latter half of 2013, with a working title of Sink-o.[23] A May 6, 2014 release date was later announced with the title Nikki Nack.[24] The album spawned three singles, including "Water Fountain", which was featured in the soundtrack for EA Sports video game FIFA 15[25] as well as in a 2016 commercial for the Google Pixel.[26] A fourth album was released on January 19, 2018, called I Can Feel You Creep into My Private Life.[27] The album showed more of an electronic influence.[28] The single "Look at Your Hands" was released earlier, in October 2017, followed by "Heart Attack" in January.[29] The Tune-Yards scored the satiric sci fi film Sorry to Bother You (2018).[29] The film was shown at Sundance in January, then began a theatrical run in July. Its soundtrack songs are performed by the Coup, fronted by the film's director, Boots Riley. Riley said he started working with Tune-Yards in "early 2015" to create the film's score, with demo tracks already available before the script was complete, and before the start of principal photography. Riley said he was attracted to Garbus's voice, and to the band's "unorthodox use of percussion and vocal layering."[30] Garbus also composed the theme music for The New Yorker Radio Hour.[31] In 2021, Tune-Yards appeared as the opening performance for Google I/O with Artificial Intelligence powered vocal accompaniment.

Merrill Garbus has performed as tUnE-yArDs since 2009, and that band name has always been synonymous with forward movement—whether because of her explosive performance style or the always-surprising way in which her songs unfold. First gaining notic.. Merrill Garbus has performed as tUnE-yArDs since 2009, and that band name has always been synonymous with forward movement—whether because of her explosive performance style or the always-surprising way in which her songs unfold. First gaining notice with the debut BiRd-BrAiNs, which The New York Times called “a confident do-it-yourselfer's opening salvo: a staticky, low-fi, abrasive attentiongetter,” Garbus forged a reputation as a formidable live presence through relentless touring. In 2011, tUnE-yArDs released its second album, w h o k i l l, a startling and sonically adventurous statement that led to a whirlwind period where Garbus and bassist Nate Brenner accrued accolades from critics (including the #1 spot on the Village Voice's 2011 Pazz and Jop poll), performed in front of increasing numbers of rapturous crowds around the world, and collaborated with the likes of Yoko Ono and ?uestlove. It was a thrilling ride, but it was one that needed a little bit of recovery afterward. "I took the Fall [of 2012] off and started taking both Haitian dance and drum lessons," says Garbus of the post-w h o k i l l period. "It was nice; I was trying to be healthy and have a good time. And then, in January [2013], I was like, 'I have nothing.' I've never had nothing before—I've always had some songs that I'm planning on recording; I've always been working live with the looping pedal and writing that way. And I thought, 'OK, if I'm going to grow as an artist, I need to do this differently.' "So I went to my studio five days a week and told myself I would be doing two demos a day. I also had rules: 'This week I'm only going to write using drum machines'; 'This week I'm going to write using vocal melodies first, and build something around that.' At the end of that, I had about 30 demos." Those demos would eventually gel into Nikki Nack, the stunning third album by the Oakland-based band. A complex, textured statement that opens with a clarion call to ‘Find A New Way’ and spends its 13 tracks getting there, it's a showcase of how Garbus's songwriting has blossomed, and a testament to how current technologies can combine with themes from the past—Saturday mornings spent watching Pee-Wee's Playhouse, puppet shows based on Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, hard days made less so by the refuge provided by top-40 radio—to create something utterly original. "It was weird what stuck," Garbus says of the writing process. "The first song that felt finished is not on the album, and I almost scrapped ‘Water Fountain.'" That pulsing track's post-apocalyptic vision is presented as a sing-along, a tale of streets where once-useful structures have been rendered into disintegrating husks with Brenner's bass playing providing an increasingly concerned counterpoint. "I almost threw it away," she recalls, "because it sounded like a kids' song. But I really liked the theme, which mirrored what I was seeing in Oakland—people don't want to pay taxes, but the taxes are paying for the water fountain, and for the trash to be picked up, all these bare essentials." Having studied both Haitian dance and drumming during her downtime, Garbus also visited the island nation in the spring of 2013 (she penned a piece about her time there for the online magazine The Talkhouse). The trip informed the record both spiritually and practically, and led to Garbus adding another instrument into tUnEyArDs' musical arsenal (which, as she documented online, includes items like a bag of rice and a stool this go-round). "There's this drum called the boula; it sets the tempo for all the other drums," she says. "It's the smallest drum, and it's played with two sticks, flat to the skin. That element of Haitian drumming acts as the hihat, or the metronome, for a lot of the songs on the album." Callbacks to the past are all over Nikki Nack, as befitting its jump-rope-chant title. Garbus's vocal performance on ‘Wait For A Minute’ recalls Quiet Storm balladry, and the song also contains a direct callback to her own past: A wobbly keyboard line provided by a Casio she received as a gift when she was nine years old. ‘Left Behind’ is underscored by a jittery nostalgia, the playground chant from which the album's title is taken eventually giving way to a chorus where Garbus's voice is masked by glossy-yet tarnished production that brings to mind the radio reigns of Lisa Lisa and En Vogue. "On the chorus," she says, "I sang those three parts and we put the recording through some crazy tape to make it sound like it was old and warped and distorted." Instead of weighing the music down, though, the heaviness of the past defiantly animates the track, which culminates in a cacophonous "Holiday, holiday"/"Let's Go Crazy" call-and-response. "That song may be the epicenter of the album for me," says Garbus. "There's a sense of people not being okay with change, and how uncomfortable change is. I have a great amount of nostalgia for times past, and I feel extremely uncomfortable with that because I think it's so misdirected and misguided to think that things were 'better back then.'" Nikki Nack has uncertainty about both the past and the future, but that's in keeping with Garbus's overall aesthetic of constantly questioning and burrowing for a "new way," tempered by the joy that goes hand in hand with new discoveries. “We worked with other producers for the first time this time around, which required that I humble myself quite a bit. We've worked with other collaborators, of course, like Eli Crews as a recording and mixing engineer again, but to ask Malay (Alicia Keys, Frank Ocean, Big Boi) and John Hill (Rihanna, Shakira, M.I.A.) for input on the tracks I had to let go of tUnE-yArDs being rigidly my production. I have a very specific vision for the sound of the band and I don't think women producers get enough credit for doing their own stuff, so I was resistant – but we grew, Nate and I both, and the songs grew. And it turns out that's what's most important: the songs, not my ego.” "Every single composer, artist, writer—anyone that I respect, there is crazy shit that's happened in all these art forms," she says. "When the shit started changing, people were like, 'Ugh, I don't want that, what is that?' And it's kind of painful sometimes being on the front line of whatever I'm doing—I'm pushing myself, so I am going to rub up against my audience's expectations, and there is going to be some friction and tension there. My job is to get comfortable with that and accept it rather than kowtow to it."

Merrill Garbus – vocals, ukulele, percussion (2006–present) Nate Brenner – bass guitar (2009–present) Touring members Hamir Atwal – percussion (I can feel you creep into my private life tour, Sketchy tour) Noah Bernstein – saxophone (whokill tour) Haley Dekle - percussion, vocals (Nikki Nack tour) Kasey Knudsen – saxophone (whokill tour) Jo Lampert – vocals (Nikki Nack tour) Dani Markham – percussion, vocals (Nikki Nack tour) Matt Nelson – saxophone (whokill tour) Abigail Nessen-Bengson – vocals (Nikki Nack tour) Moira Smiley – vocals (Nikki Nack tour)