UCHE YARA

Linz, and percussion before everything else

Uche Yara was born Uchenna Yara Katzmayr and grew up in Linz, in upper Austria, with Nigerian heritage on one side of the family. Her first instrument was not the guitar she is now photographed with but classical percussion, taken up at the age of seven, and she wrote pieces for marimba before she wrote songs. Electric guitar came at thirteen. Original material followed at sixteen.

She went through the Pop BORG in Linz, the city's pop-music secondary school, and moved to Berlin in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. Berlin is still her base, though the band she tours with is split between Berlin and Vienna.

A live reputation with no records attached to it

The unusual part of her career is the order it happened in. Before any official release, Yara had already built a working life on stage, partly as a guitarist alongside the Austrian artist Mavi Phoenix, and partly through the Vienna band Bilderbuch, with whom she played Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie and, in July 2022, the support slot for the Rolling Stones at the Ernst-Happel-Stadion in Vienna. The same year she appeared at the Belvedere in Vienna as part of its ReBoot Culture series. Festival bookings at the Great Escape and Wilderness followed, and she played Eurosonic Noorderslag in Groningen in 2023, still with nothing on streaming platforms.

She has been direct about why that sequence suited her. Speaking to NME, she said being on stage had always been the most natural thing available to her, and that playing songs to audiences before releasing them was the most immediate way to hand the work over. Her stated ambition in that interview was narrow and specific: to reach the point where a crowd sings her own lyrics back at her.

Bilderbuch, Parcels and Marc Rebillet have all taken her out as a support act, which accounts for a good deal of the mileage she covered before 2023.

The goldendays FM run, 2023 to 2025

The first release, "Www she hot", arrived in September 2023 and set the pattern: distorted vocals, guitar pushed hard, song structures that change direction without warning, and a refusal to sit inside one genre for a whole track. "Sophie" and "Panama" followed. Two EPs came in 2024 — Golden Days in May, then Honey — along with a Colors Show session built around "Zuu (zoo)".

Austrian recognition came quickly. She was FM4 Soundpark Act of the Month in May 2024, picked up a VUT Indie Award for Best Newcomer, and was nominated in the alternative category at the Amadeus Awards, with the "Www she hot" video nominated at the Austrian Music Video Awards. The wider breakthrough was a Music Moves Europe Award in January 2025, the EU-backed prize handed out around Eurosonic, where she played that same edition. She is already billed for the 2027 festival in Groningen in January.

BODYSCANNER

The debut album was announced in June 2026 with its title track and released on 25 September 2026 through goldendays FM. It runs to eleven tracks, written and produced by Yara herself. She has described the record as something she wrote with her body before her mind caught up with it, and framed it against what she called the digital, hyper-stimulated, show-off realm that chases a single dopamine hit — the stated aim being connection rather than consumption. The subject matter is the gap between how a person reads themselves and how they are scanned, judged and interpreted from outside, with the scanner then turned inward onto body, identity and feeling.

Musically it is closer to a club record than to the guitar music of the early singles, though the guitars have not gone anywhere. The title track opens on distortion and electronics; "be something" sets a husky, chant-like vocal over steady percussion; "DIVA CLUB" was conceived as an anthem for a roller derby captain, and Yara has said that its deliberate silliness turned into something closer to genuine empowerment once she started playing it to rooms.

Dork gave the album four stars out of five, with Felicity Newton calling the title track weird, hypnotic and immediately addictive, and arguing that what carries the record is its confidence — the sense of an artist entirely unconcerned with whether a listener understands the material on first pass. Loud Women read it as a dance record built to move people rather than overstimulate them. The single "hello hello", released on 23 July 2026 and picked up by KCRW as Today's Top Tune, is the album's angriest moment; Yara described it as an outcry against collective numbness, asking how people can see without witnessing and hear without listening.

Autumn 2026: where things stand

Yara launched the album on its release day at Stadtwerkstatt in Linz, the city she grew up in, then went straight into a UK leg: Newcastle on 15 October, SOUP in Manchester on 16 October, Sŵn Festival in Cardiff on 17 October, the Poetry Club at SWG3 in Glasgow on 19 October, Future Yard in Birkenhead on 21 October, the Shacklewell Arms in London on 22 October and Mutations Festival at Patterns in Brighton on 23 October.

The continental run starts at the Witloof Bar at Botanique in Brussels on 26 October and continues through Jaki in Cologne on 27 October, POPUP! in Paris on 28 October, Rotown in Rotterdam on 30 October, La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris on 31 October, Uebel & Gefährlich in Hamburg on 1 November, Rote Sonne in Munich on 3 November, Arena in Vienna on 5 November and Berlin on 6 November. A further Vienna date at Grelle Forelle is set for 16 December. The four German shows are on sale through Ticketmaster. She is also on the artist list for Pitchfork Music Festival London, which runs across Dalston venues from 2 to 8 November 2026.

The venues tell the honest story of her current level: 200- to 600-capacity clubs and bar rooms in most cities, scaling up only in Vienna, where the home-market following is largest.

The show as it is being played now

These are club-sized headline shows with a four-piece band, and the set is drawn mainly from BODYSCANNER with the 2024 EP material still in rotation — "Tango", one of the oldest songs in the book, remains the most frequently logged track in fan-submitted setlists. Promoters are selling the night as a concert and a club night running into each other, which matches how the album was built; Botanique's billing describes voice, guitar and physical presence used as three instruments to blur the line between a gig and a club floor.

Support varies by city. The Belgian producer sasja, who plays analogue synths, tape, reverb and drum machines with visuals made by the artist Ignaas Vancottem, opens several dates; sy-ki opens the Rotterdam show. Festival slots have been shorter and earlier — her Golden Leaves set in Darmstadt on 22 August 2026 ran 45 minutes, from 17:10 to 17:55 — while the headline nights are the fuller version.