Released August 28, 2026, Depth and Desire finds Los Angeles artist YMANi moving further into a sound that seems deliberately resistant to easy categorisation. Her second EP collides distorted, bass-heavy experimentation with pop instincts, creating music that can feel abrasive one moment and immediately intimate the next.
The EP’s strongest quality is its refusal to separate emotional vulnerability from sonic roughness. Recorded largely in YMANi’s apartment with a cheap microphone and Ableton, the project leaves space for the grain and imperfections of her voice. Rather than treating polish as the goal, she makes rawness part of the aesthetic. Jordan DiDomenico’s production is central to that approach, bringing distortion and weight to the songs while allowing YMANi’s vocals to remain recognisably human.
“Jungle (Feral)” is the clearest expression of that tension. Built around yearning for the person who provides a sense of grounding, the song approaches desire less as romance than emotional dependence, giving the EP some of its most immediate vulnerability. It is also where YMANi’s experimental impulses and pop sensibilities seem most naturally aligned.
Closer “Papercut,” produced by Tim Randolph, shifts the texture again, introducing a different balance between experimental elements and pop structure. That contrast helps prevent the EP from becoming sonically one-note, though the project’s appetite for abstraction occasionally feels stronger than its songwriting. Some ideas could benefit from more restraint or sharper lyrical definition, particularly when YMANi turns toward broader questions about rapid social change, personal truth and belief.
Still, Depth and Desire is compelling precisely because it documents an artist becoming more certain without sanding away the uncertainty that makes the music interesting. Its references to spirituality, ancestry, relationships and inner growth are not presented as finished answers. They are part of an ongoing search.
For YMANi, “the growth is never ending” is more than a philosophy. On Depth and Desire, it becomes the creative method, and that makes this EP a meaningful step toward whatever comes next.
Featured Image: Akeem Brandon
