YAANG tell us about their dreams and their relationship with fruit at the Rotterdam festival.

Manchester trio YAANG have made a real impact in 2025. Via March’s excellent debut EP ‘No’, itself marked by an impressive run of live shows, the band head into the new year as a more tantalizing artistic proposition than ever before. 

Catching their set at Left of the Dial, we marvelled at how tightly-honed their live show had become. Their eclectic mixture of dance music, post-punk and New Wave, thrown with a total control of an audience and topped by a delicious sense of humour, stood tall as one of the strongest sets of the weekend.

Catching up with the band at Left of the Dial ahead of their set for the latest in our Q & A series from the festival, we asked absolutely nothing about the band or their music, but learnt A LOT about their opinions on British Supermarkets. And Avocados. And hair.

How are you?

Davey: Bad.

Ben: Bad.

Ollie: [pauses] Not good!

Everyone: Yayyyy!!!

Time for our question randomiser! What is your ride or die snack!

Ben: Should I say it? Pork Scratchings. Something about the texture and the salt, and the fact that they’re ‘traditional’ and ‘gross’. 

Davey: Tangy cheese Doritos. Because I’m a child.

Ollie: This is the guy that says he’s vegan.

Davey: I don’t though, do I?

Ollie: I like pretzels. Pretzels are really nice. Like big pretzels. One time I bought a load of pretzels and I ate them all. I ordered a massive tub of them, and I made up a fake bar so I could get them for wholesale price, off an online bar supplies website. When they came in the post it said “Ollie’s Bar”.

If you have any celebrity come to your show, who would you choose?

Davey: Danny Devito.

Ollie: I don’t know. I can’t see very well so I wouldn’t be able to see them anyway.

Ben: They could have been there all along. Nelson Mandela calling out for you! [I’d go with] someone cool and influential, along the lines of….someone like…mmmm….yesssssss… Alan Partridge. I think he’d have some really good takes on what we’re trying to do as musicians.

You know he’s a fictional character?

Ben: No he’s not. He’s real! Real people though, Noel Fielding. I think that would be cool.

Which fruit is most likely to get an ASBO?

Ollie: I can’t know! 

Ben: I reckon banana. It’s like the kid that, when they’re little they’re really well behaved, but at some point during their teenage years something goes a little off. Their parents are posh but they don’t want to be posh so they act out and they go start hitting people down the shops, and their parents don’t know anything that’s happened.

Ollie: How the fuck did you get that from banana?

Ben: I just get the vibe!

Davey: You’re being very antagonistic right now.

Ollie: I don’t care, mate!

Davey: I was trying to think what the hardest apple is, like a cooking apple. Like they look like a normal apple. You think, “mmm yeah nice tart succulent piece of fruit right there”. And then you bite into it and he’s basically doing aggravated assault, instantly, and wrecks your teeth.

Ollie: That’s quite perceptive, that.

Ben: You bite the apple, the apple bites back.

Ollie: Get that collar on its leg now.

Ben: I don’t trust a Kiwi. It’s just the vibe.

Ollie: Avocado’s a fruit right? It’s threatening in the the way that it’s one of the only fruits that I know to be gentrified. Avocados are like crypto bros in that way. It’s untrustworthy because it’s in a thing and you can’t see inside it. Urgh, it’s such an Ancoats/Chorlton thing to say, “I went to shops and I bought an avocado and then I went home and I cut into it, and it’s not right. And now I’m like fuckkk, now what am I gonna do” They’re untrustworthy because they all look the same on the outside to an extent, and then you cut into it, and you’re like “Fuck. It’s brown. You know what I mean. It’s meant to be green”.

Dream meal deal?

Ben: Very boring in my meal deal department. Chicken and bacon sandwich. The dream element is that it’s not on shit brown bread. It’s on white bread. No seeds…

Ollie: Is there a specific shop in mind or are you going complete freestyle here? Are you making a new sandwich?

Ben: I’m going in Tesco, but it’s not Tesco bread. It’s good white bread. With a chunky crust. With Bacon. Chicken. Chicken mayo, maybe caesar mayo. Nom nom Nom. Big Hula Hoops. If we’re doing ‘dream meal deal’, I’ll make the bag bigger. Same price.

Normal Hula Hoops hoops are what you want though?

Ollie: We were talking about this the other day. Like you don’t really see normal sized Hula Hoops anymore. You only see the big ones. And I’ve forgotten what it’s like to eat a regular sized Hula Hoop! And also it’s like, you see, there are some things where making it bigger, it’s like, fair enough that improves it. But then you get a big Jammy Dodger and it’s just one thing, it’s like that big [makes big circle with hands], but the regular jammy dodger is like that that big [makes a much smaller circle with hands]. Just get a pack of Jammy Dodgers it’s more Jammy Dodgers per square meter.

Davey: I ate four bags of Hula Hoops today. Two ready salted. Two salt and vinegar.

Ben: And I got the cheese & onion because you’re a nice guy! Final component to the dream meal. The dream element means, that instead of having a drink, I can substitute the drink for a second snack. Therefore, I’m getting a Peanut Kit-Kat Chunky, which seems to have left mainstream supermarkets and entered ‘bossman’ shops, exclusively. So if you could get those back in mainstream supermarkets that would be great.

Does anyone else have any dreams?

Davey: I have a recurring dream where I’m stood on top of myself in bed, and I’m watching myself go to sleep, but I don’t go to sleep, so I spend the whole night in a loop and I wake up, so when I have been to sleep, it feels like I haven’t been to sleep. It sucks. I have that regularly, every other week.

So what would the snack be…?

Davey: Ham and cucumber sandwich on white bread. Pickled Onion Monster munch. It comes from my ‘povo’ upbringings. It’s so nostalgic. Then some bullshit fruit smoothie. Whatever takes my fancy on the day?

Ollie: I will say that, I love that in Sainsbury’s you can have a hot vegan sausage roll as your snack! That’s so generous of them.

Davey: I do fuck with that.

Ollie: I’m vegan, so my options are limited. The mains at Sainsbury’s are kinda rubbish now, but the fact you can get a hot sausage roll…but it is the messiest thing ever. Like you take one bite and all of a sudden my shirt is just a different colour now. If we’re being honest about the dream meal thing – sorry, this has dragged out so long – it would be one shop per item. In that case, it would be like, The Tesco all-day breakfast vegan sandwich but on better bread, and then for a snack, I’d go to the Aldi bakery and get an Apple Turnover, because they’re vegan, which is nuts, which I didn’t realise until the other day. Then for the drink, I’d just have like..beer or sum’at!!!

If you were a shape. Which shape would be you be?

Ben: Star.

Ollie: You’d be a fucking square! I’d be a dodecahedron. Sounds cool. What am I supposed to say!?

Most threatening haircut?

Ben: I work in a pub. And a thing I look out for the most is skin fade into Justin Bieber fringe.

Davey: Like ‘Ibiza guy’.

Ben: Yeah, but not down.  Across. And it’s been quite carefully blow-dried and brushed. And just a polo shirt. Like no matter what the weather is outside. Just a polo shirt and jeans.

Ollie: I don’t know about threatening, but if I had to make a comment, since being in [Rotterdam] – what, I’ve been here for like 6 or 7 hours. I’ve already seen the go-to football hooligan haircut. Obviously, the Hooligan haircut in the North-West is like what you were saying, the skin-fade into the Bieber thing. But here, it seems to be the posh, blonde, curtain kind of thing. I saw a bunch of Feynoord fans and they all had that, and were giving it lagre. If anyone’s seen the film ‘There’s only Jimmy Grimble’? Like Gorgeous George, he’s the antagonist in that. He’s a spoiled rich kid, and he has that haircut. 

Davey: Friar Tuck’s pretty awful.

Ben: It’s inviting though.

Davey: If they could clearly grow that hair on the top of their head…

Ollie: While we’re talking about ‘most threatening haircut’. The actual objectively correct answer, is someone you’ve known for years, you’ve always known them to be bald and their hair’s growing back and they’ve got a perfectly intact hairline, and you realise they’ve been bald by choice. Like Scott Brown or Pepe, or all these footballers. You realise they’ve been bald for ten years by choice. Maniacs!

A lot of footballers get hair transplants though. Would you say they’re threatening?

Davey: You are taking hair from the most threatening area of a male body. 

Ben: Is it the arse?

Davey: The pubes.

Ollie: Is that what they do?

Davey: I don’t know. I’m just remembering everyone saying Wayne Rooney had pube hairline.

Ben: I saw Wayne Rooney once. He was like three feet away from me. Crazy. I was on my way home from work.