Cafuné with Bathe at Club Dada

Sedona Schat and Noah Yoo have been honing their own brand of dreamy, sentimental indie pop as Cafuné since their days as NYU students in the early 2010s. Six years after releasing their first EP, Love Songs For Other People – a collection of fun, upbeat electro-pop tracks with a straightforward concept – the duo have today returned with their debut album, Running, via their own label Aurelians Club. Pivoting to more of an indie rock sound, the 9-track LP is a testament to their evolution as musicians: as it flits from alt-pop to shoegaze to bossa nova, the interplay between Schat’s tender, affecting vocals and Yooh’s kinetic, layered production injects dynamism to the tight melodic structure at the core of these songs. Written over a period of years but recorded mostly during lockdown in 2020, the album’s scope is at once intensely personal and outward-looking, and when these underlying tensions rise to the surface the effect is striking: “I’m crying/ We’re crying,” Schat’s processed vocals soar over a hectic instrumental that threatens to drown her out on ‘Empty Tricks’. But it’s a sense of forward momentum, not isolation, that ultimately drives Cafuné’s music, even when the road ahead feels wholly uncertain.

– ourculturemag.com