There’s a lot to hold in the seconds between sleeping and waking– the dream you just had already slipping through your fingers, the impending reality of the day about to break, the surreal moment you’re in right now. Yaz Lancaster’s AFTER finds a home in fuzzy places like these, where memories are just behind a window pane.

Their 2023 debut album, AmethYst (people places) highlighted their shimmering, translucent, and nostalgic approach to music. AFTER builds on this, taking gossamer threads of melodies and weaving them into hazy sonic worlds rooted in questions about perception. Unbound to any rules or limitations on genre, the artist presents a cohesive melding of experimental composition, RnB-tinged pop, noise, “emo ambient,” improvisatory collaborations, and clubby references across 14 tracks to conjure a sense of reverie.

Yaz recorded AFTER while in-residence at Pioneer Works in Winter 2025, and the album synthesizes their post-genre, open-minded, and collaborative process. AFTER also offers a collage of Yaz’s musical practice, swerving between the many sound worlds they live in. The album opens with shuddering notes that gradually become an expansive pasture; just a couple songs later, “Signs (ft. See The Lieutenant)” takes on the form of a classic pop song. Luminescent noise also appears, too, with tracks like “Limerence” and “dream/sweet II” shrouded in static, contorting melodies and rhythms into dream sequences. It isn’t about finding one genre or style to adhere to — it’s about refracting light in all directions.

Ultimately, AFTER is a rumination on memory. Themes of nostalgia, perceptive realities, and intimacies live both explicitly and abstracted in the textural soundscapes, obfuscated sampling, and purposefully degraded production techniques. Dreams and dreaming are conceptually salient to AFTER, with each track engaging with the ways we remember, misremember, invent, and hold/release truths.

– by Vanessa Ague + Yaz Lancaster

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Yaz Lancaster grants themselves permission to do it all. Their expansive practice encompasses experimental electroacoustic performances, notated compositions, post-genre DJ-ing, music writing, steel pan, collage-based poetry, collaborative work, and organizing DIY shows across New York City’s underground and nightlife scenes.