Nana Yamato has revealed her debut album, Before Sunrise, out February 5th on Dull Tools, and presents the lead single/video “If.” Her calling was found when one day she entered Big Love Records in Harajuku, Tokyo to buy an Iceage album. She then began going there everyday after school, where her studies shifted to the week’s latest indie rock releases. “Everything in my life started there.”

For the video, Yamato studied patterns of various animals and traced them frame by frame, making nearly 200 drawings. “The video is set up with me as an up-and-coming cartoonist who’s on deadline,” Nana explains. “She falls asleep while thinking about the comic. In her dreams, she meets the characters she created. She gets lost in her own imaginary world. My work is realistic fantasy, or critical fantasy. It’s not about fantasizing to escape reality, but about fighting reality by fantasizing.”

Nana’s debut LP, much like her previous 7” records released under the ANNA moniker, is a strictly DIY. Yamato sings and plays guitar, creates beats and MIDI melodies, in addition to creating the drawings and design of the LP itself. Produced by P.E.’s Jonathan Schenke, who has worked with Parquet Courts, Liars, and Surfbort, among others, Before Sunrise marks the arrival of an artist who has found her voice. She is not just the pupil of the new arrivals bin, but of a life spent as a defiant dreamer, in the secret world that begins after childhood and before sunrise.

Nana Yamato
Before Sunrise
Tracklist
Dull Tools

1.Do You Wanna
2. If
3. Burning Desire
4. Gaito
5. Dreamwanderer
6. Fantasy
7. Polka Dot Bells
8. Before Sunrise
9. Voyage et Merci
10. Under The Cherry Moon
11. Morning Street
12. The Day Song