Jahan and Yasmine Yousaf know how to keep an audience raging. Their stage presence and intensity drive their high-tempo electronic dance music. No one leaves the show without breaking a sweat – especially the two sisters.
Yet this summer the Yousaf sisters want to focus on recording new music and are taking a break from their live shows. Their only live performance this summer is at the Global Dance Festival on July 19.
As the siblings tweeted, the hiatus is “our 1st break since we started touring in 2012 but we had to keep Denver cuz…it’s Denver. ”
Jahan and Yasmine Yousaf Leave it All on the Stage
Without a doubt, the sisters deserve a break. The raging duo always makes sure they step out of a show drenched in sweat, smelly, and all around grimy. It means they gave it their all in the set delivered what the fans came for: a raging good time.
Appropriately, they named their first album Get Wet.
“When we’re at our shows, we walk out of there sweaty as f**k,” Yasmine explains. “There’s no other way to describe what we are other than wet. We’re drenched. And it kind of represents raging and just going crazy and living passionately. Getting wet, jumping in. It’s all about that.”
Although the sisters won’t be returning for any other shows in 2019, they have promised to channel that intensity into making new music.
The Yousaf Sisters Take Pride in their Roots
With a strong penchant for whiskey – “once you throw whiskey in the mix, it’s over,” Yasmine declares – the duo may strike an odd sight to those who harbor pre-conceived notions of how Pakistani young women should act.
“People are always kind of shocked when we tell them we’re from there,” Yasmine says. “I’m not trying to be political or anything, but you can kind of tell what I’m insinuating at.”
But the duo believes strongly that their South Asian roots are an advantage.
“I think it brings something new that people might not have expected, ” Yasmine remarks. “I love representing where we’re from. We’re always representing, first and foremost our city of Chicago, but after that we’re definitely prideful of where our parents came from.”
The two sisters got their start playing in empty buildings in Chicago’s meat-packing district. Over time, they became key members of the Windy City’s underground EDM scene.
“These shows that we were playing were at like old hotels that weren’t being used anymore,” Jahan recalls. “We also played a few warehouses in Chicago, those underground raves. It was funny; they were all kind of near the Midway airport.”
Jahan and Yasmine Yousaf Weave Traditional Sounds into New Styles
Beyond the spontaneous quality of their shows, what set Krewella apart early on was their pure musicality. At the time, dubstep defined the underground EDM scene with a heavy reliance on digital software to achieve the genre’s signature sound.
Krewella subverted those trends. Instead, the sisters utilized the more traditional musical backgrounds of its members to create a more organic sound.
“We all started as musicians on real instruments, not software,” Yasmine confirms. “In the end, everyone goes back to their roots in some way. Dubstep isn’t dead in my opinion – I love it. I love hard, grimy music. I just think you have to keep evolving and progressing upon it to make it better and catchier and better sounding.”
In songs like “Alive,” which reached the Billboard top 40 and has amassed more than 72 million views, the duo bring a lush vocal approach that is atypical of the EDM genre. While most EDM songs feature only occasional computerized voices, or single snappy one liners to break up the drops, the Yousaf sisters sing throughout. Their flowing vocals tie the otherwise chaotic sound together.
“We were just making the music that we wanted to hear,” Yasmine remembers. “Our manager at one point said, ‘You guys are the only ones who have in-house singer-songwriters and a producer. You have it all in one group.’ And it occurred to us later that maybe we were doing something a little bit different.”
Doing things “a little bit different” has always been Krewella’s calling card. Whether it’s their image as two Desi girls drinking whiskey from the bottle onstage or just the lush quality of their music, they are content to keep things on the same unique track.
Which is to say, they plan to stay sweaty for a long time to come. Fans outside of Denver will just have to wait until 2020.
