Jonah Yano begins to unveil his next chapter by sharing his new music video “The Heavy Loop.” The track was made in collaboration with experimental animator and director Nik Arthur (Dominic Fike, Makaya McCraven, UMI), the video serves as a proper introduction to Jonah’s band — Raiden Louie (Drums), Chris Edmondson (Saxophone, Clarinet, Synthesizer), Benja (Guitar), Leighton Harrell (Bass) and Felix Fox-Pappas (Piano, Rhodes) — after they first came together to record his 2023 single “concentrate” with Clairo.

The video serves as a creative exercise in musical chemistry and improvisation, with the band live-scoring a visual that they were watching for the first time from Nik Arthur, as he projected it onto the wall of the studio. The video’s two lenses illustrate the magic of improvisation with a band, with the lens on the left recording the band playing as the visual unfolds in the right lens.

“The Heavy Loop” is Jonah’s first musical offering of the year, which also includes his work contributing to Charlotte Day Wilson’s Cyan Blue and Mustafa’s forthcoming album Dunya. In 2023, Jonah released his sophomore album portrait of a dog, co-produced alongside BADBADNOTGOOD.

Jonah Yano is an artist’s artist. A producer and songwriter who has collaborated on projects by peers like Fousheé, Mustafa and Charlotte Day Wilson, he’s also co-written alongside Helena Deland, Ouri, Clairo and Monsune on his own releases. Yano is always shifting the unstable ground his songs rest on, revising it, making it anew. Often his compositions are warm, soulful, and hazily impressionistic, but he prefers to resist easy genre categorization, flitting, instead, between jazz and folk traditions, R&B and hip-hop, rock and ambient and electronic. On portrait of a dog — the 2023 album he made with frequent collaborators BADBADNOTGOOD, the Japanese-Canadian musician weaved his lilting, wistful voice into a harvest-hued mosaic of heartbreak and family memory, for which he recorded hours of conversations and digitized thousands of old photographs to wrestle with his grandfather’s encroaching dementia. The album featured guest contributions from Slauson Malone and Sea Oleena, with string arrangements by Eliza Niemi, Leland Whitty, and Yano.

Jonah Yano on IG