YorkeAre you looking around right now and noticing that your friends are coming to you with relationship woes more often than usual? Perhaps partners are slowly disappearing from your Instagram feed?
Suddenly, maybe to your delight, your mate isn’t bringing their weird partner to dinner uninvited any more?
Well, Yorke has. She’s dubbed this phenomena ‘break up season’, and has returned with a blistering pop cut of the same name. She just hopes she’s not next.
“I had just found out that heaps of my core friends had broken up or been broken up with,” Yorke says.
“I was like. ‘Damn, I hope I'm not next’. I said it really flippantly and I wasn’t serious but then that tiny speck of doubt started to play in my mind.”
“I had coffee with a friend before the session where I wrote this song and she said the phrase ‘break up season.’ I don't think I'd really heard it before or even acknowledged how true it feels. I wrote it in my notes and told her I was going to write a song about it that day. So that’s exactly what I did.”
Break Up Season, Yorke’s first single of the year and her follow-up to 2025’s Unfinished Business EP, is a pulsing echo of 2010s pop maximalism. While Yorke’s vocal delivery might be catchy and unaffected, upon repeat listens you catch the fear and anxiety she went into that session with.
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
“I love listening to songs that can be depressing and uplifting at the same time — you want to party, but it doesn’t mean your heart isn’t hurting as well.”
In the song, she describes the season of the break up as “love debris”, a tornado of emotional turmoil that leaves behind junk and damage that takes a community to recover from. That community is exactly what Yorke wants people to take away from this track.
“That debris clings to other people,” she says.
“You can rely on your village to get you through. You don’t have to go through it alone, because we’ve all been through it before. Whether it’s a friendship break up, relationship break up or even a work break up, you can and you should rely on the people around you.”
Yorke considers herself a student of the pop stars of her adolescence — Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and the like. While she didn’t necessarily fan over these artists as a child — “I was hyper-focused on Taylor Swift and The Veronicas” — she’s come back around to appreciate all types of pop juggernauts and they now directly inspire the way she approaches music.
“I headed into this recording session with a bunch of playlists and the 2010s was a strong theme,” she says, listing off hits by Britney Spears, Nicki Minaj, and Ariana Grande that she was ruminating on.
It makes sense, then, that the song’s co-writer and producer Tommy Brown — who helped pen some of Grande’s biggest hits like thank u, next and 7 rings — said that the song reminded him of Perry’s seminal pop blockbuster, Teenage Dream.
“I gagged when I heard that,” Yorke says. “I’d followed Tommy on Instagram for years. I was so nervous heading into that session, but I went into it with the mentality of ‘I want to write a hit’.
“The thing that I found the most amazing was he’d be listening to a song and say ‘Hang on… try lowering that drum beat by two DBs’. On paper, you think that’s not really going to do anything but then you listen to it and it makes such a difference. He really helped me elevate this song in ways I would have never considered.”
Working with Tommy has clearly had a profound impact on Yorke, who says “I don’t think I’ve ever been so inspired by just listening to someone talk.”
Yorke wears her inspirations on her sleeve, but they don’t just lie within music. Film plays a huge role in how Yorke presents herself to the world.
For example, her video for Love On The Run is an ode to film-noir that dominated the 1940s. But the video for Break Up Season – shot on both 16 and 35mm film – is a total aesthetic 180°.
Glistening with the baby pinks and cherry reds you’d see in an Pedro Almodóvar film but splattered with enough blood and gore reminiscent of ‘80s slashers, it’s a completely campy, horror-meets-Disney visual.
“Even down to my name, which came from being inspired by my love of romcoms in New York, cinema has always inspired my songwriting,” she says.
“The video was directed by my partner, and he goes to great lengths to educate me in so many different genres of film. I’ve learned to appreciate cinema so much more through that education. My music and my songwriting has always been quite cinematic… and now it all complements each other really well.”
The Break Up Season video in question sees Yorke open up a break-up clinic, helping all those in need – whatever it takes. Take a number, and she’ll try to fix you up the best she can.
“I often end up being the therapist in my friendship groups,” Yorke jokes, “so I wanted to play into that with the clinic.
“But, also, I wanted to get across that sometimes you have to wear the break-up and it can’t always be fixed that easily, which is why the heart surgery fails and the heart explodes.”
Despite Yorke almost literally dying for her art in the video, the lengths she went to to bring her vision to life sent her to the far corners of the internet: specifically an Aussie truckers Facebook group.
“I really wanted a giant, pink truck in my video,” she says, “and I had exhausted every lead through Google searches. Everyone was just laughing in my face. So, I joined a Truckers Australia Facebook group.”
After a barrage of unhelpful and even “abusive” comments, someone gave her a name… and nothing else.
“He didn’t link me or anything,” Yorke continues, “so I stalked that name on Instagram, found a match and DM’ed them saying ‘Hey, this might be weird but someone suggested you might have a pink truck’.’ Luckily, they did!”
While Yorke is no longer in that truckers Facebook group, she is ready to continue on the trajectory she’s built for herself, and the process of creating Break Up Season has shifted her mindset.
“I’m feeling a lot more confidence within myself,” she says.
“It’s an attitude. It’s making sure that every line is the line and not being afraid to speak my mind if I’m not feeling something.”
But what does Yorke see for herself next?
“Global pop takeover.”
Yorke’s Break Up Season is out now.
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
