The bass on Burn does not merely sit low; it seems to drag the rest of the record down with it. YS — the project of Leon Wan and Nipuna Jayasekera — build their second album from pressure, damaged memory and the pleasure of making familiar materials behave badly.
Released on 11 September 2025 as a joint release between Pace Yourself and YS’s ERF imprint, Burn follows the duo’s 2023 album Brutal Flowers. That earlier record prized patience and emotional drift. Here, seven tracks compress the same sensitivity into something more confrontational: breakbeats hit harder, samples feel more unstable and the low end carries the threat of soundsystem music without settling into a single genre.
Wan and Jayasekera work across music and visual practice. Their history also includes Potatoheadz, the Melbourne/Berlin DIY label they founded with Sam Sedgwick, while more recent YS work has moved through sound collage and plunderphonics. The four-track Non Partial, made through file exchanges in 2023 and completed at Studio Asbestos in Berlin, used appropriated voices and dense electronic composition as material rather than ornament.
Burn makes that cut-and-paste instinct physical.
The title track begins in deconstruction: a slowed vocal sample from Flowdan hangs over a beat that feels both lumbering and alert. “Switch” turns bass pressure into an organising force, while “Falling” lets disembodied voices drift through a more unstable frame. “Moth” moves with the obsessive repetition of something discovered on an old tape and worried at until its original context disappears.
The reference points around YS are broad — Bristol trip-hop, dub production, turntablism, pirate radio, skate and graffiti culture — but the duo avoid neat revivalism. Their beats have too much digital abrasion and their arrangements are too willing to fracture. The 1990s are present less as a sound to reproduce than as an idea of underground culture: records, crews, copied media and techniques moving sideways rather than through official channels.
That makes “Drift” especially useful. With additional vocals from Sofia Fuentes, it opens a pocket of light inside the album’s heavier architecture. The contrast reveals how much feeling sits underneath YS’s grime and distortion. Even at their most ominous, Wan and Jayasekera remain interested in memory — how it decays, loops and returns with its emotional charge intact.
By the closing “End”, Burn sounds less like a genre exercise than an argument for mess. YS take the residue of several underground histories and refuse to polish it. The scratches, ghosts and overloaded frequencies are not defects in the picture. They are the picture.
