YAZ turns a stalled talking stage into the single If We Don't Know Each Other

YAZ has released a new single, If We Don't Know Each Other, and the Camden-born singer has been unusually specific about where it came from. She arrived at the studio with a single verse written and a bad week behind her, and left with the chorus she now calls one of her favourites.

The bad week was a stalled situation with someone who kept advancing and retreating. "When I wrote this song, I was feeling really deflated," she told Clash, describing a talking stage in which she could not work out why things could not simply be straightforward. That question is what the verse she brought in was about.

The session changed the song's temperature. Producer Joseph Tilley and Ryann Barnes, a writer and artist from Los Angeles, brought what YAZ describes as energy and lightness to material that could have gone somewhere much darker. Once the hook was recorded, she says, the rest of the track came together quickly.

The result is a bold pop vocal with a sting in it. The song reaches a resolution that is less about the other person than about YAZ deciding her own feelings come first, which is a harder ending to write than a straightforward kiss-off.

That instinct for oversharing is the thing her audience has built around. YAZ writes from her own life in enough detail that listeners treat the songs as one side of a conversation, and the two EPs that got her here, Wish You Were Here and then Dancing in My Room, worked the same way. Both generated a considerable amount of online attention for an artist at this stage.

What the single does not come with is a parent project. No EP or album has been announced alongside it and no release date has been given for one, which leaves If We Don't Know Each Other as a standalone step rather than a trailer for something dated.

The track is out now. Upcoming releases are collected on the release calendar, and more pop coverage sits on our genre hub.