REVIEW: Yumi Zouma - No Love Lost to Kindness

Some things get better with time

44:42 // January 30, 2026 // Nettwerk

The internet’s been fairly obsessed with 2016 nostalgia recently, and while it may seem like nostalgia cycles are getting to a point where we’ll be longing for December 2025’s relative peacefulness soon, I… kinda get it. If you’re reading this, there’s a fair chance you remember what you were up to a decade ago, and, perhaps for the first time, it actually kind of mattered what you were up to. We were in the early stages of properly moving to wherever we may have ended up today, and that feeling of beginning something can be quite nostalgic. Like discovering Yumi Zouma and not yet knowing they’d be releasing their best record a decade later. Yep, that’s the segue, deal with it.

Yumi Zouma have spent the past decade exploring and creating their own brand of dreamy indie synthpop, and it’s one that has always been readily enjoyable. The primary caveat is that all of their albums wear a little thin by the end of their (not especially long) runtimes - they’ve got a vibe, and they stick to it - that’s their superpower and their only weakness. All that’s to say that fifth LP No Love Lost to Kindness caught my eye, based on its promotion as a “bolder, heavier, and more emotionally exposed” effort than before. Nostalgia be damned, color me intrigued!

No Love Lost to Kindness only qualifies as “heavy” by the standards of the limpest softboi (at least that’s what he told me before being blown away by a light gust of wind (hey sunny shh that was gale force!!!)), but it’s undoubtedly true that this album feels notably different than previous LPs - and that’s for the best. There’s a sense of aggression present on a lot of these tracks, and the first half of the record feels as upbeat and rock-y as anything in the Yumi Zouma discography, even while being often drenched in gloom (see post-punk-esque opener “Cross My Heart and Hope to Die”). There’s some of that on the latter side of the record too, but the album’s greatest trick is its subtle but palpable shift towards more subdued beauty as it progresses, combining a newfound sense of moody exhilaration with their more prototypical sense of smooth pop execution. Later tracks like the closing duo of “95” and “Waiting for the Cards to Fall” are minimalistic and vocal-centric, capturing a wonderful sense of melancholy which feels well-attuned with the angst which propels some of the more energetic earlier numbers.

However, the best thing about YoomZoom’s new album is the fact that it feels like a fully realised body of work, celebrating the band’s sound and pushing it forward at the same time. Perhaps for the first time ever, you can point to individual songs and single them out as “the rocker”, “the heartbreaker”, “the storyteller”, etc.. In fact, that last descriptor can be applied to two highlights known as “Phoebe’s Song” and “Judgement Day”. While the former blends a gorgeous guitar tone into a sprawling dream pop cut, the latter blends the relatively danceable nature of old school Yumi with their newfound sense of subtle grit.

Is No Love Lost to Kindness Yumi Zouma’s best album? The answer to that hard-hitting question is a resounding “yes”. While I have quite the attachment to 2017’s Willowbank, I think we can beat the sub-decade nostalgia and appreciate this new record for what it is: really damn good. While firmly rooted in their past, it shows that the band are clearly ready for the future - a future with ever so slightly more heaviness and a batch of fully-realised songs.

8.0/10