On September 10th, 2025, Australian-American duo Yulan & Blaise return with Quench—a track that feels less like a single and more like an atmosphere you wander into. The third cut from their forthcoming debut EP, Quench bends art pop into something spectral, threading bossa nova and downtempo textures through angelic vocals and a surreal palette of sounds.
The duo describe Quench as the sound of being stuck in an “in-between”—a place where desire and suffocation coexist. “Quench is about being trapped in a soft-focus loop, comforting and paralyzing all at once,” Yulan explains. “I wanted it to feel like addiction or attachment repeating itself, tender but suffocating, like cotton candy brain fog.”
That tension manifests sonically through the duo’s signature experimentation. Self-produced, the track is stitched together with uncanny detail: a sample of their French aria Réveillez-moi, Yulan’s heartbeat pulsing as the kick, and an unlikely orchestra of instruments—Omnichord, toy piano, shakuhachi, mezzo soprano sax, and Blaise’s trademark contrabass saxophone, the same instrument that has shaped his two-decade tenure with folk-punk icons Violent Femmes.
Visually, Quench pushes even deeper into the surreal. The Gabriel Morrison–directed video finds Yulan & Blaise caught in a looping dreamscape, inside a pastel pink bedroom inspired by Trainspotting (1996). “We wanted to collide the pastel opulence of Sofia Coppola with the gritty unease of Danny Boyle,” Yulan shares. With art direction by Jane Makela, the clip plays like a fever dream where nostalgia and unease dance uneasily together.
A Love Story Reimagined in Sound
Yulan & Blaise’s work is more than music—it’s a lived-in mythology. The pair met while performing at Tasmania’s MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, and their upcoming EP folds their love story into cinematic extremes. Their previous releases—God Complex (Far Out Magazine’s Debut Single of the Week, #9 on SBS’ Chillest 100 of 2024) and the bilingual Falling 花火落 (praised by Plastic Magazine for its “poise and creativity”)—established the duo as fearless visionaries reworking intimacy into soundscapes.
Together, Singaporean-Australian interdisciplinary artist Yulan Jack 杰克玉兰 and Mexican-American multi-instrumentalist Blaise Garza build worlds that feel both alien and strangely familiar. It’s experimental pop, but it’s also storytelling, ritual, and reclamation. Living and working on unceded Palawa land in Lutruwita/Tasmania, Yulan & Blaise continue to carve out a space that is entirely their own.
With Quench, they’ve distilled the strange, looping spaces of longing into a dream you don’t quite want to wake from.
