Review | Mumrunner - Yearning Hearts
Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love is a movie that feels bigger than the screen it’s watched on. After a brief introduction to the central plot of two neighbors discovering their significant others are both having an affair with each other, the movie soaks in the longing and the pain of such an act. Its presence is there with you, sitting in the room, unconstrained by any medium of viewing. The film’s original title in Chinese means “the age of blossoms” and “the flowery years”, which refers to a Chinese metaphor of the brief time of being young and in love. There is a sense of beauty amongst the heartbreak, present in the city environments of Hong Kong in its twilight hours, and the real-life situations the movie presents.
Yearning Hearts by Mumrunner is, by no stretch of imagination, tapping into similar emotions and ideas throughout their new record. Hailing from Finland, the shoegaze/alternative greats are back with their second full-length, aiming their nostalgia-drenched guitars and wispy vocals at your ticker. The band is also making their way across the Western US on a small tour supporting the new tunes, captivating old and new fans respectively. Yearning Hearts has stuck with me like a dense fog in the air, an autumnal breeze of a record as it dances delicately on your skin. It can be chilling, and it can also be elegant.
The first sounds you hear on the album is perhaps one of the strongest feats of the band: the drumming. A lively hi-hat groove begins the first track “Cat State,” an immediate reminder that drums this pronounced aren’t often featured in the genre. They hook you throughout the song, and I was happy to bring the song back around once finishing the album. “Soot” also follows suit here, and the climax of that track has some of my favorite drum fills in shoegaze, period. The emotion in the track is as palpable as the black ash the lyrics describe, culminating in a remorseful back end tacking on weight with each passing second. From Mumrunner themselves, the track “evokes a haunting mix of sadness, fear, and a desperate hope for reconciliation, all while confronting the reality of irreversible change.”
Speaking of the end of “Soot,” almost every track on Yearning Hearts cashes in and doubles down in the back half, presenting notable outros that flourish and bloom with intrigue. I have always been a fan of bridges/B sections in songs, and Mumrunner are no strangers to making their endings count. Whether it’s picking up the pace, turning it down, or a flaring solo, the tracks develop and reinvent themselves by the end, making use of their own knack in songwriting and emphasizing the multifaceted emotions that can be felt amongst the music.
Mumrunner, 2025
Listening to Mumrunner’s new album did “bring me back” in a sense. I was reminded of how I would consume anything that was considered sad as a teenager; an indie romance film, a break-up album, poems and literature on loss. While I look back fondly on some, most felt one-dimensional. They were emotionally dense, yes, but offered little substance or meaningful reason for its sadness. Yearning Hearts is a bit more complex in range and emotion, because you may not feel sad when listening at first. When you let yourself dig into the lyrics, or feel the melodies wash over the rest of the track, you can tap into what Mumrunner has presented. A yearning heart can be many things, and within seven songs, the band explores them each with different sentiments.
I am also brought back to when I reviewed the single “Bond” from the band on Arctic Drones, way back in 2018. That song was a great dose of the Mumrunner formula, also ending in a strange grunge-driven outro that initially caught my interest in the group. Two records and a handful of EPs and singles later, the band are still making a fresh mark in shoegaze. Mumrunner proves that not all shoegaze lives in the one-dimensional world that my deep dives on sad art sometimes did, and have aimed to present something beautiful and unique to them. Please check out the new record and consider supporting the band through the links below.
Mumrunner
Genres: Shoegaze, Dreampop, Alternative Rock
Rating: Cry your eyes out/10
Written by Evan Lurie
