Running is the debut album from Cafuné. During the five years after Noah Yoo and Sedona Schat graduated from college together in the mid-2010s, the duo continued to write songs and play shows in New York as they worked around their day jobs. As they honed their live set, the band’s sound evolved, and their audiences grew. By late 2019, they were graduating to larger venues in the city, ready to launch a new chapter. But then, the pandemic hit, putting those plans on hold. One of the reasons Running took so many years is because at times, tensions between Schat and Yoo were fraught. In the years leading up to the album, they sometimes went months without speaking to one another, and the future of Cafuné was up in the air. One of the songs on the album is “Talk”; it’s about the tension between feeling alone and alienated while also wanting to feel better and needing to open up to people. Improvised around the clanking pipes of Yoo’s apartment, the atmosphere on the track is spectral, glowing with the distortion of an old heater and the digital haze of manipulated drum breaks.
