Born in the rural outskirts of Marseille, Yarostan formed in 2016, built on the ashes of personal burnout and shaped by political despair. Mentioned on IDIOTEQ in the recent MonastR feature with their 6 eclectic Marseille acts worth a check, the band takes its name from Letters of Insurgents, a 600-page exchange of fictional letters by Sophia Nachalo and Yarostan Vochek, published in 1976 by Detroit’s anti-authoritarian Printing Coop. The book, rediscovered in 2010 through a collective reading circle and zine culture, became central to Yarostan’s identity, as well as their lyrical and ideological foundation.
Their new record, III, released May 25th through a coalition of DIY labels across Europe and South America—Bus Stop Press (FR), Dancing Rabbit (DE), Dingleberry (DE), Stonehenge (FR), Entes Anomicos (DE), Imperecedero (Chile), Itawak (FR), Seaside Suicide (FR), Seitan’s Hell Bike Punk (FR) & New Knee (USA)—abandons direct adaptation from Letters of Insurgents, but retains the same voice: unsatisfied, reflective, stubborn.
“By the time the boxes will show up to our door, we’ll already be working on the next one,” writes Giz, one of the band’s vocalists and lyricists. “Pushing the boundaries in other directions.”
The record opens with “Cathédrales de poussière”, a track reflecting on the personal and social cost of choosing alternative paths. Its tone isn’t defeatist, but blunt: “Whatever it is you’re doing as an ‘alternative’ it will not be looked upon good… the rules are rigged anyway.” The chorus lists the ruins left in the wake of trying to live differently: dust for the lonely, dust for regrets, dust as sorrow. But the act of naming remains defiant.
“Interstices” continues with a tentative refusal of nihilism. “So at last, how many worlds are in yours?” it asks. The lyrics suggest collective care as resistance—warming one another by the fire of the lampposts, painting the colorless horizon. It’s less about romanticized utopias and more about carving out a shared breath inside the greyness.
“Godot” references the Beckett play in name, but lyrically goes deeper through the lens of Günther Anders’ critique of passive waiting, from The Obsolescence of Man. Yarostan don’t offer easy closure, but they resist paralysis: “To no longer believe is impossible for us… The night never stops coming down, and there are now thousands of us under this tree.” There’s a recognition that hope returns not as a choice, but as a survival reflex. Anders’ influence is layered with ideas from the insurrectionary anarchist text At Daggers Drawn, framing waiting itself as a political trap.
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With “Jubilé”, Yarostan reclaim a term often associated with monarchical or religious celebration, reinterpreting it through older, pre-biblical traditions where jubilees meant cancelling debts and leveling inequality. Instead of Proudhon, the lyrics lean into Fredy Perlman’s Against His-Story, Against Leviathan: “Our salvation is within us, let’s live without waiting for it.” The tone is raw, refusing transcendence and claiming immanence—liberation is not outside, it’s in what’s lived and made here.
“Consolation” draws directly from Swedish writer Stig Dagerman’s Our need for consolation is insatiable, quoting from an audiobook version. The piece—originally submitted as a refusal to write a fluff piece for a women’s magazine in 1952—underlines the fragility of any reprieve: “We always apt when it comes to believe that every moment of relief will last forever, But it doesn’t, and we spend our time getting up to better fall again.” Yarostan weave this reflection into the album not as closure, but as confession.
The album ends with “Ne pas rester, ne pas partir”—a track positioned as a response to the opener. It doesn’t resolve anything, but holds the contradiction of staying and leaving, of caring and burning out. “We can’t accept that all of this is done,” Giz writes, “but we can’t give up either.” The lyrics are stark: “If you’re leaving me, you’re preserving yourself from failure / If you’re staying, you’re losing yourself.”
Before III, Yarostan appeared on a 4-way split with Esconder Micara (Chile), Ezinegon (Basque Country), and Adelfa Neriüm (Colombia), released in late 2023 by Stonehenge and Imperecedero.
The tracks from that session—“Commencer à vivre” and “Magarna”—were directly based on Letters of Insurgents. The former adopts the voice of Sabina Nachalo, celebrating radical self-determination: “Those who love life will be throwing these bastards to the sea!” The latter, titled after an anagram within the novel, alludes to historical uprisings like the 1956 Budapest Commune and critiques “tankie” revisionism that excuses repression in the name of progress. “The glitter of the monarch’s world isolate, but do not defeat us,” writes Yarostan Vochek in the text.
Though the band never profited from stolen cars or rebranded goods, they identify with the DIY ethos the novel upholds. “As the years go by, we’re still involved in putting on shows, maintaining self-managed venues and practice spaces, recording our own music, putting out records and tapes, and zines & books.” Guitarist and synth player Yann even builds the band’s equipment. For them, this kind of autonomy is a form of resistance. “The world would indeed be a much better place if we knew how to do a little more things by ourselves.”
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Yarostan’s III isn’t revolutionary in sound, but it is stubborn in its refusal to perform resignation. The album walks with you through burnout, contradiction, and ambivalence—and somehow still chooses to move forward.
Check out the full track by track commentary, explaining both 2 tracks from thieir split with Esconder Micara, Ezinegon & Adelfa and all tracks from “III”.
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“Commencer à vivre” [Starting to live] is “sloganistic” and romantic in a way insurrectionary anarchist writing can be, though nowhere in the song we really turn it into a chorus. Instead, it takes the voice of Sabina, who talks about how the money into a big collective house and garage is turned into their hobbies, that lead them to develop new skillsets.
“thriving from our discoveries,
to no longer wait and start living.
If we’re ever to destroy what maims us,
it will be because we would have started to live.
Those who love life will be throwing these bastards to the sea!
If the joyless chore is put back into place,
we will not reproduce it.”
– Sabina Nachalo in Letters of Insurgents
We used the translation of the text as lyrics, with minor adaptations to fit the singing line we had. The record itself has translations of those lyrics into english, basque and castillan spanish. Despite characters originally boasting these claims talking about the redistribution of money obtained from re-branding stolen cars and prostitution, and that as far as I’m aware none of us in Yarostan ever dealt with such income, its idea does deal with this sort of DIY absolutism that we somehow share.
As the years go by, we’re still involved in putting on shows, maintaining self-managed venues and practice spaces, recording our own music, putting out records and tapes, and zines & books. Yann, who plays guitar and synths actually built most of our equipment (bass, guitar, pedalboards & amplifier cabinet’s), and we’re still trying to push it further, just like the music.
It’s a friendly competition in which everyone is invited : the world would indeed be a much better place if we knew how to do a little more things by ourselves, had a little bit more autonomy, because it would mean we’d need “them” a little less.
“Magarna” is an anagram for “Anagram” within the story, that doesn’t directly name any place, made up names for each of the characters, as to “not help the police here and there.” But what it really does is a construction of characters inspired by various sets of experiences with radical & revolutionary lived activities from the springs of Prague and Paris in 1968, to the leftist student newspapers and the Mccarthyist whichhunts of the 1950’s, and even as far back as the russian and spanish revolutions. And all of the lives in exile in between.
The segment that mentions the repressed uprising of Magarna is told in the past tense, when Yarostan recalls working at a factory, just before being sent back to prison. “Magarna,” then becomes an anagram for the 1956 Commune of Budapest. In the real world, this was a spontaneous insurrection against the official marxist bureaucracy that was in power there, which was heavily repressed by armies and tanks coming from all over the soviet world. Just like they would, later in Prague in 1968, and Poland in 1982, and the list goes on, each time sending troops in a crusade against “reactionaries,” because to be their enemy, would mean they would be enemies of “social progress.”
For the record, that is why the epithet, or slur, “tankies” exist, to call for these totalitarian communist defending the repression of popular insurrection by tanks, all in the name of some idea better imposed on others. For a great read on the revival of such totalitarian-leftism, have a go at the pamhlet “Always against the tanks” available from the Anarchist Library. [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-always-against-the-tanks]
“For an instant, our resignation had given space for hope,
to the anticipation of a life in which the big projects would be possible,
conditions to transgress, to human beings alive and free.
The glitter of the monarch’s world isolate, but do not defeat us.”
– Yarostan Vochek in Letters of Insurgents.
This leads us to the lyrics of our newest release, “III” which isn’t directly taken from Letters of insurgents. We started it out with “Cathédrales de poussière” [Cathedrals of dust], which is a testimony to remaining involved in what we’re doing, being music or activism, in spite of it “ruining our lives” in the common understanding of it.
We’re privileged in being from and livin in western europe, and no matter how much subversive we want our lyrics to be, and even if we take a great deal in translating them and printing them out when we go out to play shows, they aren’t something we could be trialed and repressed over in the current state of affairs. That’s not the case for some other bands in some other places.
So if repression exists everywhere to finish the job, the main threat to any unconventional life remains the good old peer pressure, which may not actually come from your peers as such. Whatever it is you’re doing as an “alternative” it will not be looked upon good, it will make it hard to commit to anything else that “success” is understood as : a job, a family. The most serious you’re getting at it, the more you will have to compromise on a life played by the rules, and make choices that you will perhaps not be able to change. But those rules are rigged anyway. A nod to all those who keep on “ruining their lives” as they say.
“Cathedrals of dust, for those who have nothing,
Cathedrals of dust for the regrets
Cathedrals of dust, for those who will end up alone
Cathedrals of dust, for the live on credit
Cathedrals of dust, to sweep away with one blow
Cathedrals of dust, imperfect but without measure
Cathedrals of dust, what’s left for us
Cathedrals of dust, sorrow as heritage ”
“Interstices” follows up on trying not to drawn in the ambient pessimism, bringing up once again the hope of doing things by ourselves.
“So at last, how many worlds are in yours?
And if what’s left of the horizon is still colorless,
then we’ll paint it to be less ugly
We’ll warm each other at the fire of the lamp posts
We’ll smile you and I, and will forget about the fog and the greyness.”
The litterary references in “Godot” is perhaps the most obvious of all so far, but it’s layered in a manner that beyond the Waiting for Godot play of Samuel Becket, its really drawing from it’s deep critique by Gunther Anders on the impossibility for humans to accept nihilism, which is collected in the first volume of the Obsollescence of Man.
It more or less could be summarised that we’re still there, waiting, or hoping that something is going to happen because we can’t just accept that nothing’s going to go on. And then again, this insurrectionary theme of being done with waiting, and how it’s just important to begin acting now, best written about in At daggers drawn with the existent, its defenders & false critics.
“Waiting, always, resignated
Sitting for a moment
Stuck in our armors
This world’s only reach our hearts
To no longer believe is impossible fur us
When this hope we thought long gone comes back
Sparks reviving our cinders
The night never stops coming down,
And there are now thousands of us under this tree, isolated
Our only certainty is to be there,
with the power to revive our flames
and burn out our stars”
Most of the uses of the word “Jubilé” these days call for the celebration of a politician, a priest or a monarch having been on its throne for fifty years… If we do believe power is a poison that corrupts the minds, nobody should ever be in a situation of holding one for so long, if there’s a need for anyone at all. But opening up a dictionary will confirm our other use for the term, as a religious ritual dating from the mystical times the mainstream religions of today had some egalitarian pretentions.
In the times of the tribal jewish society, it was a tradition that for every 49 or 50 years, debt and property was to be abolished and “inequalities” started over. There’s some mentions of it in Proudhon’s essay against private property as theft.
But the lyrics aren’t inspired from Proudhon’s writings, and rather Fredy Perlman’s tale of the civilisation as a beast, turning Hobbes on its head in his Against His-story, against leviathan, with a line about our salvation being within us, and not from above or beyond, as a nod to the classic italian pamphlet on DIY explosives from the late 19th century, itself probably a reference to a much more passive essay of Lev Tolstoï.
“ So if certain that every empire ends up falling
What’s to do with a world that no longer has an outside ?
No barbarian to storm the gates and finish this dying beast
Our salvation is within us, let’s live without waiting for it
We’re desiring in negative, because beauty is already here
Its the bars from the cage that are too much
Let’s danse as many ulcers in the stomach of this monster
Jubile, tabula rasa, nothing to lose but half lived lives. ”
“Consolation” isn’t a copy and paste of Stig Dagerman’s Our need for consolation is insatiable, but the extract from an audiobook version of it is, although you can find an english version of it there. Let’s celebrate Stig’s admission into the public domain anyway, and this text as his bold answer to a work for hire on lifestyle by a swedish “ women’s magazine ” in 1952, contributing instead one of the most beautiful answer to the meaning of life, if there ever was one, keeping it short enough to propagate it as a short pamphlet.
“ We always apt when it comes to believe
that every moment of relief will last forever,
But it doesn’t, and we spend our time getting up
to better fall again ”
“Ne pas rester, ne pas partir” [To not remain, to not leave] wraps up the album as an answer to the opening track, and the whole lengh of the record didn’t change much to the question : we can’t accept that all of this is done, and for ever, that it’s finished or perfect. But we can’t give up either, and the impossibility of this choice has consequences. We’ll leave it at that until the next one.
“If you’re leaving me, you’re preserving yourself from failure
If you’re staying, your losing yourself
Look me in the eyes and tell me I’m wrong”
On this record, Yarostan is Yann, Andy, Giz, Micka, and Jason. The album cover and music video were created by Andy, with photos for this article taken by Aymen Gold. The band will be on tour from June 5th to 15th and again from July 9th to 12th, with additional festival appearances planned for the fall.
