Yaelokre

Cavite, Iceland, and a world built in childhood

Keath Ósk was born in Cavite, in Luzon, the Philippines, to a single mother, and was adopted into an Icelandic family; their adoptive father joined the household when they were ten. The musical grounding came from their mother, who taught them guitar, piano and singing. The narrative grounding came from the books, films and games their father brought with him. For most of their childhood the ambition was not a recording career at all but teaching and illustrating children's books.

Out of that came Meadowlark, a fictional world Ósk invented and kept adding to through childhood and adolescence — described by the artist as a diary that turned into a storybook. It was never conceived as an album concept. It existed first as writing and drawing, and the songs arrived later as a way of getting inside it.

Ósk uses they/it pronouns, identifies as genderless, and has consistently declined to give an age, a reticence that sits oddly alongside a project built on extremely detailed public world-building.

Four masks and one singer

The Yaelokre name went up in early 2024 almost without a plan. The conceit is an ensemble called The Lark — Cole Seymour in a leveret mask, Clémente Dearworth as a kid goat, Peregrine August as a moose, and Kingsley as a tree — with Ósk writing, singing and voicing all four, performing in animal masks and Renaissance-styled costume. Alongside them sit the Harkers, wandering storytellers within the same setting. Every release came with Ósk's own illustration.

The debut EP, Hayfields, was self-released on 2 March 2024: four songs, roughly sixteen minutes, guitalele-led chamber folk with verse written in a deliberately archaic register. A second self-released EP, Songs of Origin, followed on 25 September 2024.

What happened in between was not planned either. "Harpy Hare", from Hayfields, took hold on TikTok in July 2024. It entered the TikTok Billboard Top 50 at number 34, reached number 19 on the UK independent chart, and sat at the top of Spotify's Global Viral Songs chart for nine consecutive days. Official US streams rose 577 per cent between mid-June and mid-July 2024, then a further 186 per cent the week after. By the time the album cycle began two years later, the Yaelokre catalogue had passed 550 million streams worldwide and the project counted more than five million social media followers.

The first real test of whether any of this worked on a stage came in February 2025, when Yaelokre opened for Aurora at the 3,000-capacity New Frontier Theater in Manila. Philippine press folded the project into both the folk revival and the OPM lineage; Nylon Manila listed Ósk among its breakout acts of 2024 and Billboard Philippines among its artists to watch for 2025.

Atlantic, and the records that followed

Atlantic Records signed the project, and the release schedule tightened considerably. The Origins EP arrived on 23 October 2025, Composing Colentine on 12 February 2026, with singles including "Kid & Leveret" and "Cole's Response" filling the gaps. A touring band formed around Ósk: Reynaldo Capuno on percussion, Emil Ortega on guitar, Eugene Rabang on drums and JD Santos on bass, with Ósk on vocals and guitalele.

The debut album, Foreword, came on 4 September 2026 — and it is a strange sort of debut, because almost nothing on it is new. Across twelve tracks it re-records eleven songs already released under the Yaelokre name, adds an unreleased demo called "Insatiable", and closes with a cover of Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero". It is credited not to Yaelokre but to Keath Ósk.

That renaming is the point. Ósk's explanation is blunt: "Keath Ósk was made so that I can have a small corner to be." The songs were written by an omniscient narrator describing masked characters; on Foreword they are sung in the first person, by the person who made them up. The arrangements moved with the perspective. Producer Jack Hardman, who works as Good Dog out of south London, took what began as a stripped-back acoustic re-recording and built brass sections, woodwinds and keys around it, pulling in jazz, Americana, alt-pop and hip-hop. Ósk sang lower, dropping the thin high register that defined the EPs.

Reception has treated it as a deliberate break rather than a cash-in on the back catalogue. Reviewers have noted that each re-recording reads as a different story from its original, and that the record works better as evidence of range than as a replacement for Hayfields. The brass-heavy reworking of "And the Hound", released as the lead single and paired with a dance-led video, is the clearest statement of the new direction.

Where things stand in October 2026

The 49-date world tour opened on 7 October 2026 at Club Wintercircus in Ghent and is still billed under the Yaelokre name, not Ósk's — a split the project has not resolved and perhaps does not intend to. The European leg ran through Amsterdam's Melkweg on 8 October, Prague on 11 October, Berlin on 12 October, Warsaw on 14 October and Kraków's Klub Studio on 15 October, and continues to Vienna, Munich, Zürich, Madrid, Barcelona and Paris before reaching the UK and Ireland.

British dates fall between 27 October and 2 November: O2 Academy Bristol on 27 October, O2 Academy 2 Birmingham on 28 October, O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire in London on 29 October with doors at 19:00 and an 23:00 curfew, then Leeds, Glasgow on 1 November, Manchester and Dublin. Several dates across the run are already sold out.

The European leg ends with an appearance at Iceland Airwaves in Reykjavík, which runs from 4 to 8 November — the first time the project has played a stage in Iceland since the 2024 breakout. The North American leg then runs from 9 November to 20 December, taking in Webster Hall in New York on 22 November and finishing in Houston, with stops including Orlando, Atlanta, Nashville, Cleveland, Boston, Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, Denver, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Dallas. Canadian songwriter Ben Caplan opens 27 of the dates.

What a show looks like

The performance has settled into a fixed shape across the 2025 and 2026 legs. Ósk appears in character and in mask, fronting the five-piece band, and the set follows the arc of the Meadowlark story rather than chart logic — "Harpy Hare", by far the best-known song in the catalogue, lands two-thirds of the way in rather than closing the night.

Audiences arrive in costume, which is unusual at this scale and has become part of the staging by default. Fan accounts of the 2025 shows describe sets that started on schedule, ran with more physical energy than the recordings suggest, and were followed by Ósk meeting people afterwards. The Bowery Ballroom show in New York on 6 November 2025 drew specific praise for sightlines and sound in a small room — the kind of detail that matters more as the venues grow.