Yomogi sways between folk roots and electronic winds
The Montreal artist joins Holly on stage for a first glimpse of their upcoming album
On July 18, singer-songwriter Yomogi and her vocalist, Holly, shared a fleeting glance on stage just before the beat dropped into one of their unreleased songs.
Both wore face paint—dots tracing lines down their foreheads and beneath their eyes—like markings drawn from the earth itself. Barefoot and draped in flowing garments, they swayed to a slow-building beat that pulsed beneath layered synths and soft vocals.
Their voices rose together, quiet at first, then swelled into a smooth, echoing crescendo. When the beat broke loose, they launched into a swirl of sweeping arms and flowing hair. It was a moment suspended between the wild and the intimate.
That night marked the first time they performed together on stage, but their sound felt full, lived-in—like it had been shared before.
“We started practicing like a week before the performance that you saw,” Yomogi tells me a week later, sitting across from me with Holly at the café Le Brûloir.
Their creative partnership runs deeper than that night’s set. The pair first met in the blur of Montreal Comiccon 2018, both volunteering support for a mutual friend Lia, a Japanese artist flown in from Tokyo.
Holly was on makeup; Yomogi was a runner, darting through backstage chaos with last-minute errands. The pace was relentless, but something between them settled quickly.
Orbiting through shared circles without realizing how much they had in common, they drifted in and out of each other’s lives for a while.
“All of my close friends are her close friends,” Yomogi says with a smile, looking at Holly. “And we only realized that later on.”
The two had sung together before in casual settings—often in the after-hours of McGill University’s music rooms—but only recently did Yomogi officially ask Holly to join her as a vocalist.
Despite a few sound issues during their first set at the Vietnamese food festival Cho Dem, Yomogi says sharing the stage with Holly brought a new kind of energy.
“It adds a lot of power—a kind of depth to the whole performance,” Yomogi says. “I really felt much more in my element when I was performing.”
The pair moved in sync, mirroring each other in sweeping, instinctive gestures that felt more like ritual than choreography. Their movements carried the music, unfolding through every motion.
“For those more dancey songs, you want the crowd to feel your energy—you want to convey that to them,” Yomogi says of their performance. “And for the quieter parts, you just really want them to listen. Even if they can't understand or hear the lyrics, you want them to feel it.”
Yomogi’s music resists classification, ranging from folktronica to synth pop, and shifting fluidly between moods and tempos. Some tracks lull you into a kind of trance; others make you want to get up and move.
“Everything that is a social issue or controversy or taboo, all of the things that are hard to speak about or are hard to put into words: I'm the type of artist who likes to translate them through music and make the world a more open place,” Yomogi says.
One of Yomogi’s unreleased songs, “Orphan Heart,” draws from her experience with isolation.
“In the end, I think we are all alone in a way,” Yomogi says. “We only have ourselves to rely on, even though we have family and friends who care and support us.” That isolation, she says, also comes from the emotional weight of being hurt by those we trust. “Orphan Heart” leans into the quiet search for a place to call your own.
“Everything that is a social issue or controversy or taboo, all of the things that are hard to speak about or are hard to put into words: I’m the type of artist who likes to translate them through music and make the world a more open place.” — Yomogi
“When people break your spirit—not out of anger necessarily, but out of love—it can hurt even more,” Yomogi adds. “It pushes you further into the idea that, okay, I only have myself.”
From unreleased songs to a cover of Aurora, one of her biggest inspirations, Yomogi’s first set with Holly felt like a glimpse into both her music and the friendship behind it.
Cat-Linh Nguyen, a volunteer at the show, described Yomogi’s music as “ethereal.”
“I couldn’t look away even though I was supposed to be working,” Nguyen adds with a laugh.
That presence on stage is something Holly knows well.
“Her voice is so versatile and powerful. She listens to something, works on the technique, and she’s got it,” Holly says. “She’s so expressive and always able to convey emotion.”
Yomogi is currently working with Holly on her next album, planned as a two-part release—one in fall 2025, the other sometime in 2026. Three times a week, they head to their producer’s studio in the morning and don’t leave until nightfall.
Yomogi explains that it’s rare to find people in Montreal who fully commit to music in a way that takes risks, but she sees that drive in Holly.
She describes Holly as a perfectionist.“Even though she thinks that’s a flaw, I think that’s what you need to make your music expand beyond the average,” Yomogi explains.
Their friendship is built on this shared passion and mutual inspiration, and both often remark on how much they appreciate where their ears lead them creatively, pushing each other to explore new sounds and ideas.
“She has the potential in her to make a big impact, and I really want to see where she goes,” Holly says, looking at Yomogi. “So I want to be there pushing her along.”
Being a small, growing artist in an oversaturated industry takes a lot of resilience, and Yomogi often turns to journaling to reconnect with her purpose in music, asking herself why she does what she does.
“It's always about the world and how it's headed, where it's headed, and obviously it sounds very grand and as one person you cannot save the entire world, but you can create a movement,” Yomogi says. “You can create this community or a unity that will bring change, and that's the whole point for me.”
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