After making one of Brazil’s biggest queer pop breakthroughs with the official Rio Pride anthem “IGUAL,” Brazilian-Moroccan artist YANN is stepping into a bold new chapter.
His new single, SHOOT BANG KILL, marks both his English-language and U.S. debut, launching an ambitious independent era that has been quietly taking shape over the past two years. Written by YANN and produced by Bruno Knauer, the track opens with an unexpected 8-bit intro before glitching into shimmering synth-pop 12 seconds later, a creative choice that mirrors the emotional whiplash at the heart of the song.
Ahead of the single’s release, I sat down with YANN to discuss his long-awaited return to music, the deeply personal experiences behind SHOOT BANG KILL, and why he’s giving David Lynch’s dreamlike universe a distinctly queer perspective.
A Project That Couldn’t Be Rushed
Although SHOOT BANG KILL is the first song fans are hearing, YANN says it’s only the beginning of a much larger body of work.
“Honestly, it’s hard to answer this without giving too much away, because the larger project this song belongs to hasn’t been revealed yet,” he told me. “What I can say is that I knew from the start exactly what I wanted to make. The shape of it, the emotional territory, the sonic world. That was clear from day one.”
What he didn’t anticipate was how long it would take.
“I thought I could finish it in maybe six or eight months. It ended up taking me two full years, and honestly, if it had taken three, that probably would’ve been the right answer too.”
For YANN, the extended timeline became part of the process.
“This project couldn’t be rushed because it’s the most vulnerable and raw thing I’ve ever made. SHOOT BANG KILL is just a small taste. What’s coming behind it is the reason I worked so quietly for two years.”
That vulnerability extends to the song itself.
“This is the song I tried not to write,” YANN said. “I’d promised myself I wouldn’t fall in love again after my last relationship ended, and then someone walked in and ruined the promise.”
He continued, “Every lyric is something I actually lived through. It’s a diary no one was supposed to read, scored for the dancefloor.”
Dancing Through Heartbreak
The single wears its influences proudly, drawing from queer synth-pop pioneers while grounding the story in YANN’s own life.
“I’ve been in love with ’80s pop for as long as I can remember,” he said. “What that era of synth-pop understood, especially the queer artists in it, was that dance music and melancholy aren’t opposites.”
He pointed to artists like Bronski Beat and Pet Shop Boys as guiding lights.
“The best of it lets you dance through something you might otherwise sit with. Bronski Beat was singing about the loneliness of gay life in the ’80s while getting you on the dancefloor. Pet Shop Boys turned intellect and heartbreak into something you could play at a party. That was the lineage I wanted to inherit.”
While those influences shaped the foundation, YANN said producer Bruno Knauer helped bring the sound into 2026.
“I think the modern part comes from working with my producer Bruno Knauer to translate that to 2026 and from the fact that the songs are about my own lived experiences.”
Why English, and Why Now?
Before beginning this project, YANN believed his music career had come to an end.
“To put it bluntly, I had given up on music,” he said. “I thought that chapter belonged in the past. I’d built a life around other things, told myself I was done, closed the door as cleanly as I could.”
But the songs kept finding him.
“Something funny happens when you try to close a door on the thing you’re actually here to do. The urge kept coming back.”
Eventually, he accepted that songwriting remained the way he understood himself.
“When I try not to write, I stop understanding my own life.”
Writing in English also became an obvious choice.
“The experience that this is about—the falling in love, the breaking apart, the falling in love again—all of it happened here, in this language,” he said. “Writing about it in Portuguese would have felt like translating my own life.”
The transition marks a significant moment for the artist, whose previous single “IGUAL” became the official Rio Pride anthem, reached No. 6 on Spotify Brazil’s Viral chart and generated more than 300 media stories, including coverage from Billboard and O Globo.
Giving David Lynch’s World A Queer Twist
The song will soon be followed by a music video that YANN describes as “a queer take on the David Lynch universe meets ’90s gaming.”
For him, Lynch’s work has always felt emotionally familiar.
“What he did that nobody else has done is treat the subconscious as a real place, with its own geography, its own rules, its own logic that we recognize even when we can’t explain it,” YANN said. “His films work the way dreams work.”
Still, he felt there was one piece missing.
“I always felt something missing in his work: you’d rarely see queer people existing on screen the way they exist in life.”
Rather than reinvent Lynch’s aesthetic, YANN sees his video as expanding it.
“I don’t think I’m adding something foreign to his universe. I think I’m making explicit something that was always structurally there.”
The visual also borrows heavily from classic video game aesthetics.
“I’ve always loved video games. Saturated colors, pixel textures, the feeling of a world inside a world. The video sits in the intersection of those two aesthetic universes.”
The project, premiering in August, is directed by Sam Reiss, whose credits include CHANEL and Mugler, with cinematography by Vince Rappa, who has worked with Selena Gomez, Apple TV, Adidas and David Beckham.
From Pride Anthem to Personal Confessions
YANN’s previous music often centered on community. This chapter turns inward.
“IGUAL was a song of collective celebration written for a very specific moment in queer Brazilian life,” he said. “The new work is less about the collective and more about the specific. Less we, more I.”
He doesn’t see those approaches as competing.
“I think queer life needs both. It needs the anthem for the parade and the confessional for the walk home from the party.”
“This chapter is the walk home from the party.”
Betting On Himself
Because YANN is releasing SHOOT BANG KILL independently, every creative decision has remained his own.
“Basically everything,” he said when I asked what creative freedom had allowed him to do differently.
“The rollout structure, the song lengths, the fact that the intro is 12 seconds of chiptune before the real song begins, the fact that the music video is queer Lynch meets ’90s gaming instead of something more commercial.”
He admitted many of those ideas likely wouldn’t have survived traditional label conversations.
“None of those choices would have survived a label conversation intact. Every single one would have been questioned, and some would have been overruled.”
Instead, every success, and every risk, belongs to him.
“There’s no one to blame if it doesn’t work. That’s terrifying, but it’s also clarifying. You stop making choices you can defend in a meeting and start making choices you can defend to yourself at 2 a.m.”
More Music Is Already On The Way
Although SHOOT BANG KILL marks the beginning of this era, YANN says listeners won’t have to wait long for what’s next.
“More music, more soon, more often than people expect from an independent artist,” he teased. “There’s another single coming this summer. Then more through the fall.”
Because the project has been developing privately for two years, there’s already plenty waiting in the wings.
“I’ve been quietly building this for two years, which means there’s a lot of material ready to come out. I’m ready to take you to the dancefloor in the next months.”
When I asked what he hopes first-time listeners experience during the opening minute of SHOOT BANG KILL, his answer perfectly summed up the song’s emotional arc.
“Lost, then found.”
The 12-second chiptune intro isn’t just a stylistic flourish.
“That structural surprise is intentional. It mimics what falling in love against your will feels like. You think you’re in one thing, and then suddenly you’re in something else, and it’s already too late to back out.”
“If someone feels that in the first minute,” he said, “the song did its job.”
Click here to listen to SHOOT BANG KILL. You can also stream the song now on Spotify and Apple Music.