The comfort of a bedroom is something you can’t quite replicate. The companionship of clothes scattered across the floor that you said you’d move yesterday and still haven’t, or the playlists you’d never put on shuffle in the company of others. It’s the place where many can be honest with themselves. Dance badly, cry over things that aren’t that deep, and write thoughts down in the dark that always read differently by morning.
YAZ is North-West London’s singer-songwriter in ascent, whose sophomore EP out via EMPIRE, Dancing in My Room, honours the feelings a bedroom creates. This room in particular once framed a teenager posting YouTube videos to nearly 700K subscribers. Over time, it’s also become the space where a 23 year old processes arguments with sisters, friendships gone cold, and writes letters to her eleven year old self, – all of it finding its way into Dancing in My Room. “I hope this music feels like a friend,” she says. “Something honest to relate to or just have fun with.” Every person who listens will receive it in a room of their own.
Her 2022 debut “Mr. Valentine” was teased on TikTok and took on a life of its own with 7.5 million Spotify streams and early praise from The Guardian and i-D. Her independently released EP ‘Wish You Were Here’ followed in 2024, and for a while she wasn’t sure whether the girl from the YouTube videos and the artist she was becoming could exist in the same sentence. “I had in my head, you can be one or the other,” YAZ says. “No one’s going to take you seriously.” She knows now that was a self sabotaging kind of trap. “I definitely shied away from it for a while because I didn’t know if both were possible,” she says. “That’s just a really limiting way of thinking. I’m a 3D person. And I think that’s a good thing.”
Dedicating a whole EP to a bedroom may seem like a small canvas, but YAZ has been inviting people into hers for a decade. First through the videos and now through the music, the room has always been where she’s been most herself, and most willing to share it. “My room has always been the place where I create the most,” she says. ‘Because you’re by yourself. There’s no outside opinions.” It’s where she figured out who she was and what she wanted to make, and for someone who describes herself as naturally introverted, that space was everything. “Writing and performing has given me so much confidence,” she says. “I feel like I can do that anywhere now.”
Wish You Were Here was a different beast. Made independently after her first record deal ended, YAZ describes the process as intentional but tense. “I was approaching it like I wanted to write songs rather than convey my own experiences. When you’re chasing something, it kind of runs away” she says.
With Dancing in My Room, she managed to get out of her own way. “The ego is taken out of it a lot,” she says. “I just wanted to see what I could make.” A lot of that came down to producer Joseph Tilley, who she worked with across the whole project. “He was in a marching band, he’s from Arkansas,” she says. “He brought a lot of country influence, guitar, stripped back the production, which I loved.” Working with one person, she says, made everything feel more solid. “It gave me so much confidence. It felt a lot more linear. “ It wasn’t a manufactured process at all. With Dancing in My Room, I wasn’t really chasing anything. I was just kind of being. And the songs came a lot more naturally.'”
The scariest song she’d ever made turned out to be the most important one. On Wish You Were Here, she’d written Necklace and sat on it for days, unusually reluctant to play it to anyone.” I didn’t send it to my manager or anything,” she says. “I actually waited a couple of days, which is so unlike me. I usually come out of the studio and just play it to everyone. And then when I finally played it, my sister cried. I don’t think she’d ever cried at a song I’d played to her before.”
She didn’t forget that going into Dancing in My Room. The last day of three months in LA, working with Tilley, she had an argument with her sister. With just a few hours before her flight she went straight to the studio. “I was not at all trying to be relatable,” she says. “I actually thought it was not relatable at all. I felt like a bad person. I just wanted to get it off my chest.” It’s since become one of the EP’s most talked about tracks. “I think songs need to come from experience for them to actually relate to people,” she says. “These feelings are universal.” The song she was most embarrassed by, the one she wrote for nobody, ended up saying the most to the most people.
It’s not unlike the records she grew up loving. She cites Fleetwood Mac, the Carpenters and SZA’s Ctrl, all albums that weren’t trying to be anything other than honest about a moment. “When I heard Control for the first time,” she says, “it made me feel so normal. The way SZA was speaking about herself – I was like, wow, I feel like someone is similar to me.”
It’s also no coincidence that another inspiration, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, was recorded by a band in the process of falling apart.
Yaz has her own version of that with Room for Two, about the particular sting of a female friendship going cold. “I think all girls have experienced feeling left out or on the edge of a friendship group. It’s such a universal thing, especially with female friendships, to have kind of a competitive vibe, a bitchy vibe even, though girl friendships are like the best. They’re honestly one of the best things to ever happen to me. But it’s not straightforward. I think people feel left out a lot of the time.”
Her room has always known that. “Writing and performing has given me so much confidence,” she says. “I feel like I can do that anywhere now.” The bedroom isn’t just where she started making music, it gave her the space she needed until she was ready to leave it.
