It's been two fertile years for Yhan Leal since he released his last recording. Quietly determined, Leal has come from busking nightly outside Bellingen's IGA, to developing a career as a bona fide touring and recording artist.
Leal’s new album, the eponymous Yhan Leal, was recorded in Leal’s home in Bellingen and in three renowned Sydney studios. The new full length album contains all the ethereal dreaminess, melodic guitars and haunting harmonies that are the halmark of Yhan's hypnotic style, but also takes a new direction with the augmentation of a full band and production on several tracks. Themes of love, loss and grief, travel, peace and freedom, are explored with a maturity and honesty, that has developed with Leal's own journey of genuine musical evolution.
The single “Up on the Mountain” has a youthful innocence akin to the Laurel Canyon sound of Devendra Banhart and Edward Sharpe, and seemingly explores the paradoxical relationship between peace and stillness, and emptiness and loneliness.
Overall the album tells us that although life is not always easy, it is still worth embracing and celebrating in it's entirety.
Yhan Leal will launch his new album at Bellingen Memorial Hall on Saturday November 11. You will be moved!