A small Buddha magnet sat on the piano while Ania Babrakowska wrote. It had travelled back from Japan in her luggage — a pocket-sized souvenir from a day spent wandering temples, standing inside the Great Buddha, walking along the coast and through bamboo forests in the city of Kamakura. That quiet, collected energy ended up shaping not just one song but an entire record. Tomorrow, on March 20, Youth Novels release their debut album “Kamakura.” Today, they’re sharing its focus track, “The Sun.”
Youth Novels are Babrakowska and Emil Nowak, a Poznań/Gniezno-based duo whose music sits in a space between Daughter and London Grammar but leans into something more personal and unhurried.
They’ve built a steady catalogue over the years — three EPs, including “Blue,” mixed and mastered Chris Allen and Jason Mitchell (both worked on the album, too, and are known for their work with RY X and PJ Harvey), and a string of singles that have quietly expanded their reach.
“Woman” picked up 2.3 million streams on Spotify. “Skin Rework,” recorded with Sam Thompson (The XX, Ellie Goulding) at Air Studios in London, and “Hands,” a collaboration with Dutch producer Ferry Corsten under his FERR alias, added different textures to what they do. Their most recent single before this album cycle, “2NITE,” was made with German producer and musician Frank Wiedemann. Along the way, they’ve played Open’er, OFF Festival, Spring Break, and Męskie Granie, and opened for Hooverphonic, Father John Misty, and Oh Wonder.
“The Sun” follows earlier singles “Stay in the Moment“, “The Place” and “Kamakura” in building toward the album. It was written by Babrakowska and Nowak, produced by the two of them together with Hubert Pilarski — known for his work as Formeo and Hope Leslie, and from the Wodecki/Pater project — and recorded at Kamil Pater’s studio in Kocewka, a place with its own quiet reputation (Maria Peszek’s “Ave Maria” was made there too).
The string quartet arrangement comes from Ania Krycińska, performed by Tokłowicz with Strings — Wiktoria Tokłowicz, Agata Doszczak, Marcelina Murawska, and Natalia Chrostek. Max Psuja played drums. Mix and mastering, as with the rest of the album, were handled by Chris Allen, whose credits also include Ólafur Arnalds and Calvin Harris.
The album itself took about a year to produce, though the songs had been growing much longer — the earliest sketches reach back to 2021. “Gone Now,” the opening track, was the first piece that locked the record’s direction into place.
Everything on “Kamakura” leans toward organic warmth: trumpet from Patryk Rynkiewicz, the string quartet, live drums, guitars, and vocals that sit close and airy, almost whispered. The band describe the vocal presence as something that reaches the listener directly, with long, immersive reverbs opening up the space around it. Arrangements are restrained, unhurried, built to let each feeling arrive on its own time.
Kamakura the place became Kamakura the album through accumulation rather than design. Babrakowska’s trip to Japan — the temples, the sea, the dense woodland — brought scattered emotions into focus, but the record draws on more than one geography. Sounds from a black sand beach in Iceland sit alongside fragments of everyday moments, graffiti, distant voices, the memory of a Japanese guide heard on the way to Nikko.
Travels through Greece and Italy fed into it too, alongside stretches of self-reflection that had nothing to do with any specific location. The visual side matches: black-and-white photography by Dawid Stube, mixed with personal shots from the band’s own archive — studio days, travels, stillness. Monochrome, but full of light.
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The lyric video for “The Sun” was created by Stube and Youth Novels. The album comes out tomorrow, March 20, via the band’s own label. Youth Novels celebrate the release with a show on March 21 at Yutori in Warsaw.
