Merrill Garbus sees a connection between her background in puppeteering and the music she makes with Tune-Yards, her Oakland, California-based avant-garde dance pop band, performing June 17 at WOW Hall. Tune-Yards comes to town supporting their 2025 release Better Dreaming, their first new album in four years.
Tune-Yards’ first record, BiRd-BrAiNs, a cult-classic hit, came out in 2009 (back then, the band name was head-spinningly stylized tUne-yArDs).
Early on, Tune-Yards was a Garbus solo project, relying on loops, Garbus’ jazz-inflected voice, and occasional ukulele to create an eccentric sound similar to LCD Soundsystem: experimental new wave-influenced electronic music.
But then, as now, with Tune-Yards, unlike LCD Soundsystem, there’s no Brooklyn cool — only California good vibes allowed.
These days, Garbus’ husband, Nate Brenner, plays bass in the duo, adding an even funkier backbone to the music, further heightening Tune-Yards’ already infectious mandate for movement.
It’s in her use of loops, which are still featured heavily on Better Dreaming, where Garbus brings up puppeteering.
On stage, “I’m trying to create a little magic for an audience where they don’t, they can’t look and know exactly how that’s happening,” Garbus tells Eugene Weekly in a Zoom call, comparing that to a puppeteer pulling strings.
“Thinking about all the different ways that you can become a, quote-unquote, rock musician,” she adds. “I came to rock music through performance of any kind. I studied theater in college. I did improv comedy and was into experimental ensemble-based theater. All of those things play into what I do.”
Better Dreaming expands Tune-Yards’ style without sacrificing any of the mischievous fun the project is known for, deepened somewhat by Brenner’s addition on bass. As always, there are Afropop influences, Garbus’ soulful voice and sprinklings of techno textures.
In addition to the ukulele, Garbus rotates through various percussion instruments, while Brenner sometimes plays a Korg keyboard, too.
“Tune-Yards has always been the place where I can be myself,” Garbus says, “but also filter what I see going on in the world through my perspective, through myself.”
At the same time, Better Dreaming is somewhat topical, with calls for political and social unity on disco anthems like “How Big Is the Rainbow.”
As far as current events, Garbus, who says she’s not religious, has Jewish heritage. “What was and, horribly, still is happening in Gaza was very, very present in my life,” while making the record, she says.
“Often in my days of the studio,” she recalls, “I would take a break to get to Jewish Voice for Peace meetings that they have at noon,” an American Jewish anti-Zionist and left-wing advocacy organization.
“It’s been a lot of heaviness around what it means to be Jewish,” she says, “and to be geographically far away,” from Palestine, but still “feel complicit in a genocide.”
Meanwhile, the climate crisis was also on Garbus’ mind while making the record. While recording the album, she says she asked herself questions like, “How do we adapt to these changes, and how do we keep up in ourselves and our bodies and our spirits?”
World affairs aside, Tune-Yards most of all want people to reacquaint themselves with being in the same room together.
On the current tour, Garbus says shows feature sing-alongs. “If you like to sing in crowds of people,” or if you like to listen to people singing all together, “this is the show for you,” she says. “In a time of such conflict and horror in the world and our country, we’re trying to bring joy.”
Tune-Yards play with Portland’s Ringdown, a new project from Danni Lee and groundbreaking Pulitzer Prize-winning classical vocalist Caroline Shaw, behind their debut full-length pop album Lady on the Bike. The show is 7:30 pm Tuesday, June 17, at WOW Hall, 291 West 8th Avenue. Tickets are from $26 and the concert is all-ages.