While in the studio working on new music, Krewella — sisters Jahan and Yasmine Yousaf — thought a lot about what it means to peak.
They were aware, of course, that the word can be derogatory when used to reference someone whose biggest accomplishments are behind them. But they found so many other layers to the concept, considering the futility of just continually chasing peak moments, what it means to be truly accomplished — and how, for them, real success comes from life’s lowest moments, as well as its highest ones.
While the sisters have been making inventive, thoughtful, banging dance music since they arrived on the scene in 2012, they could only have made their new album now. Called Peak, the project is a summation of the sisters’ states of mind, with its 12 songs considering love, spirituality, aging, grief, joy and other subjects, taken on with wisdom and reverence and set to productions dually delicate and throttling.
Peak is Krewella’s first album since 2022, with the duo completely stepping away from music for two years before returning to the studio, realizing that expressing themselves through the format is less a career path, and more a fundamental part of who they are.
Here, the sisters talk about making the album, what they learned from the Nervo sisters and what it really means to peak.
1. Where are you in the world right now, and what’s the setting like?
Jahan: We are in Los Angeles both at our separate places, but we live pretty close by, so we get to walk to each other’s places for studio time. For me, the setting is without air conditioning, so I have a lot of fans blowing. I’m burning some incense right now, so the vibes are here.
Yasmine: I’m a four-minute walk from Jahan. If we couldn’t live together, we had to live in the same neighborhood. I’m in my living room, because it has the best natural light — but the real reason I’m here is because our dog is on the couch next to me, and I wanted to be near her, and she won’t come in the studio where I usually work.
2. What is the first album or piece of music you bought for yourself, and what was the medium?
Jahan: Kill Hannah’s Wake Up the Sleepers. It’s a band from Mat Devine from Chicago. He stumbled upon us on MySpace way back in the day when we were dropping demos there and invited me to sing backup vocals on two songs on his band’s album. It was my first time sharing my voice in that way and recording in a professional studio, so it felt like a really big deal for me. I bought the album because of that, and I remember going to Best Buy to purchase it.
Yasmine: We didn’t buy music. We had a local library that had an insane arsenal of CDs, so we would go and surf through thousands of CDs. You were only allowed to take home eight at a time. This is before I knew anything about anyone and I was just going purely based off of what was on the CD cover, but the first one I took home was The Cranberries’ Wake Up and Smell the Coffee. The album had all those giant red spheres on it. I was like, “This looks cool,” and it ended up being one of the soundtracks of my childhood.
3. What did your parents do for a living when you were kids, and what do they think of what you guys do for work now?
Yasmine: Our mom was a self-employed graphic designer until she retired three years ago. She dropped out of college, went into the workforce and worked her way up to the point that she was her own boss. She did catalogs and circulars for the furniture industry for decades. She was just a one-woman powerhouse. She was always working, always on call, ready to make changes, sometimes working 12-to-14-hour days. We’re really proud that she retired, because she was obsessed with working. Our dad ended up as a real estate agent here in Los Angeles, but he also retired last year.
Jahan: As far as what they think of what we’re doing, they’re both very supportive. In the beginning, I think they were skeptical and concerned. But the older I get, the more I’m understanding of that, because you want your child to be taken care of. You want them to have health insurance. You want them to have a sense of financial stability, and the path of an artist doesn’t always guarantee that.
So they were concerned, but also supported us however they could. Our mom loaned us money for our first microphone, and once we started touring, our father was front row in the VIP at our shows. Considering the cultural background he has, being an immigrant from Pakistan, he’s had to break past a lot of his own cultural conditioning to fully embrace us being tattooed women at nightclubs around a bunch of people that have been drinking. We’re very grateful that he’s trusted us and that we have that intimate relationship with him, where we can confide in him and update him on what we’re experiencing in our personal lives and career.
4. What is the first non-gear thing you bought for yourselves when you started making money as artists?
Jahan: When we signed a record deal with Columbia, which made me feel a sense of legitimacy and being taken care of, the first thought was like, “I can now go to Whole Foods and just rack up the bill with all kinds of healthy food items and not have to worry about it.” That was literally the first thought that came into my mind, investing in good-quality food.
Yasmine: My first big purchase was my first pair of eyeglasses that I had put off my whole life, because I just didn’t want to spend the money. I finally bought myself glasses so I could see. It’s crazy to put that off.
5. If you had to recommend one album for someone looking to get into electronic music, what album would you give them?
Yasmine: Just because I saw them at Just Like Heaven last weekend, LCD Soundsystem‘s Sound of Silver is legendary, and if you want to understand why dance music is what it is today, that’s one of the essentials. It’s punk and dance and so many amalgamations of what was happening in music at one time. Even if you don’t love it, just listen to it to understand historically what was happening in dance music.
Jahan: It’s Bloc Party‘s Silent Alarm. I just listened to it all the way through for the first time in a few years, and I was reminded of what an incredible, exquisite, excellent album it is from top to bottom. There are no filler songs, and there’s so much energy with the drum work and guitar riffs.
6. What’s the last song you listened to?
Yasmine: This morning I was driving us from the gym to go get coffee, and I put on Rival Console’s Persona, which is one of the most interesting dance records I’ve heard in a long time.
Jahan: “Ecstasy” by ATB, but the Morten Granau remix. I could never get tired of “Ecstacy” by ATB, and the remix does the original song justice, but also creates a fresh way to receive it. That song literally is ecstasy. It creates this sparkle and shimmer in your mood. Whenever I’m in a funk, I turn it on and it immediately helps me have a more hopeful perspective on things.
7. Your new album is called Peak. What’s the meaning of the title?
Yasmine: How much time do we have? [Laughs.] When Jahan and I were conceptualizing this album, we had hours of conversations around what it means to us. I still don’t feel like we have our elevator pitch, because it’s so layered. It started as a thought that I had back in 2023, before we had started working on this record. That word kept coming up for me, because there’s a lot of negative and positive feelings around it. We’ve heard people talk about us or other artists like we’ve peaked, or [the word references] high moments in someone’s life.
Everything we talk about is very “as above, so below,” so we were like, “How are we experiencing this internally, and how is that projected into our reality?” The more we discussed “peak,” the more we realized that, as we’ve gotten older, it’s chasing a high, then getting into a low, then chasing a high. We see it all around us in a world that’s constantly moving faster and faster and more, more, more… Everybody’s goalposts are constantly changing.
8. How did you take that concept and work it into the music?
Yasmine: We’ve come to this idea that the peak feels like such an illusion, because once you start integrating some of the hardest moments of your life with some of the most joyful, most beautiful, most euphoric, you realize they’re all supposed to be in conjunction with one another. Back to the idea of the peak being an illusion… the peak feels for us now like it’s just constant. We’ll keep going, keep creating music, and we’re so grateful to still be doing this together almost 20 years later. We’ve gotten to this point where we’re not chasing anymore, we’re just flowing with it.
9. The album explores themes of why one even creates art at all. What answers did you come up with?
Jahan: That’s also a never-ending question, because as we create and self-express, it’s this journey of knowing and discovering ourselves and finding healthy outlets for energy that wants to be released from us and alchemized. A lot of the time, we come back to simply for the joy, for the pleasure of experiencing this life together as sisters and as a duo. It feels like such a rare gift, and this is such a temporary experience we have on this planet in this skin form. When I think about the opportunity Yasmine and I have had to create together, it feels like something we both just want to seize.
10. How has that attitude been useful for you?
Jahan: We always come back to it whenever we find ourselves thinking ahead about the outcome or how our music will be perceived. I think it’s very human to know if it resonates and to want it to resonate. I also think that’s okay. In the studio, there were a lot of times Yasmine and I were like, “Oh, The Krew’s gonna love this,” because we can imagine what it’s like for people who are on the rail at head banging and jumping and singing and crying over the lyrics. So it’s also an offering for people to have some refuge from whatever their worries and troubles are.
11. Anything you’d like to add Yasmine?
Yasmine: We took two years away from making music entirely. There was a moment where I was saying “I’m not even a musician anymore.” It’s so funny to me now. That’s delusional. But I was so disconnected with the experience of being a musician, because I’d become very burnt out and jaded, and these are things Jahan has gone through, too.
12. How so?
We’ve gone through the waves of being artists for so long, and things happen and destroy you, and you rebuild and destroy and rebuild. Eventually, if you don’t process properly, you burn out. The way we’ve come back into music is with a parallel hunger and joy that I remember feeling when we first began. While I’m sure being away for two years set us back in a million ways, there was no other way to do it. I’m so grateful for that space, because now I feel hope and a kind of freaky obsessiveness with being a musician. I’m so excited about everything we’re doing. That goes back to what Jahan said about doing it for the joy, because I don’t know how to be anything else. This is it. This is what I love. I tried to not love it, and I’m back. Jahan knows exactly what I mean.
13. Did you know what you’d do if you weren’t being musicians?
Jahan: We both have a lot of creative pursuits outside music, and there are going to be times in our lives where we go on side quests. It helps give us perspective to look at our roles as musicians differently, because sometimes our identity gets very attached to being a musician. Lately I’m just putting more effort even into cooking and finding joy in the domestic realm that’s purely for myself. There’s no outcome attached to it. There’s no recognition. It’s simply for the joy of creating more beauty in my life and nourishing myself. When I think about taking better care of my plants, cooking, learning about nourishing myself in a way that’s treating my body with respect, all these things feel like creative pursuits that are for my own self reward.
14. You’ve been doing this for a long time. On a pure skill level, what are you better at now than you were 20 years ago?
Yasmine: It’s discernment. Knowing what belongs and what doesn’t belong. Even when we were writing our 2022 album, The Body Never Lies, we were still in this place of “More is better.” With this album, we still have Krewella’s classic 7,000 vocal and synth layers, but we got better at knowing what doesn’t need to be in the song because it’s not adding anything. Sometimes, in fact, it’s making it worse.
Jahan: On a more tangible level, Yasmine, it’s been really cool to see your pre-mixes evolve throughout the album process. From the first song to the most recent song, what we’re sending to our mixer requires less work in the actual mixing process. Our music is sounding more finished before the mixing process. I also think Yasmine and I are becoming more skilled at knowing we each have different sensitivities and finding the middle ground of that. There’s going to be something she might think she’s nitpicking about that I’m unfazed by. There might be things I’m being perfectionistic about, where she’s like, “That didn’t bother me.” When we honor those sensitivities, that’s how we hone in on the final product of the song.
15. Jahan, you’re the co-founder of Nagar Women’s Health House, a nonprofit clinic in Northern Pakistan. What are the new developments there?
Jahan: Sadly, what’s going on right now is really intense monsoons. It’s in the northern region of Pakistan, and I’m sure you’ve seen the footage from the past past couple days. Every summer, the weather conditions are getting more extreme from global warming and these glaciers are just bursting and sending massive floods throughout these northern villages. So what these villages are experiencing right now is a complete loss of infrastructure, a loss of homes.
What we have there is a very small clinic in this region called Chitral, which is in northwest Pakistan near the border of Afghanistan. We started supporting this clinic with some family members on the Pakistani side of our family during the pandemic when we had a lot of spaciousness to think about purpose and how to create a meaningful life. It’s been about five years of serving the villagers daily with general health checkups, the region’s first ultrasound machine, stitches, wound care and health seminars. We’ve been really blessed to have people who listen to our music support the project as well with donations.
16. What’s the last incredible musical performance that you saw?
Yasmine: I went to Outside Lands, and we’re such huge Death Cab fans. On Sunday Death Cab was the festival opener and closer. For the opening set they played Plans from front to back, which is one of their biggest and best albums. It was so good. Later that day I saw Frost Children, and Jahan and I love Frost Children. Then later I saw Empire of the Sun, and I don’t know of a better performance act out of our generation — the costumes, the set design, the visuals. I was blown away.
17. What are the proudest moments of your career so far?
Jahan: For some reason I’m thinking about the lowest moments Yasmine and I have been through, and how we navigated those. Like when the band was falling apart in 2014, and when there was a lot of negative public s–t floating around about us. That was when I started going on a more spiritual path of having to remember why I want to make music.
That’s when Yasmine and I started working on our relationship more, and that’s something I’m really proud of. It’s the stuff that happens behind the scenes, in quiet between just Yasmine and I. I’m very proud of the moments when we’ve chosen to continue showing up for the relationship, for the sake of creativity and to better ourselves and remain pillars in each other’s lives, even in these very ugly moments we witnessed in each other and within our career.
Yasmine: Making our parents proud always gives me a sense of pride, but as soon as you started speaking, it definitely puts me in a mindset of knowing that any charting moment or festival play pales in comparison to the moments you realize you will survive. It’s the moments where you’re like, “Well, we’re gonna be okay, and we can actually survive and thrive.”
18. What is the best business decision you’ve ever made?
Jahan: Investing in therapy.
Yasmine: Literally, yes.
19. Who’s been your greatest mentor, and what’s the best advice they’ve given you?
Jahan: I could get emotional thinking about Homayun Khan, my Hindustani classical voice teacher. Our sessions are so deep, and he has humanized this whole concept of being a master. He is a master teacher, but also a student, and he’d validated my own inner struggles and introduced a sense of ease to my relationship with my voice and my voice practice. I’ve cried many times in our sessions because of the transmissions and the wisdom he’s sharing with me from our lineage as well.
Yasmine: I wouldn’t call them mentors, because we haven’t necessarily had that relationship, but I have to shout out the Nervo sisters, because ever since Jahan and I started on the scene, they were already there. In 2011, 2012, it was very much like, there’s not enough space for all of us women. That was still the energy. They never made us feel that way. They actually set an example of how powerful and strong women can feel in a room and still make space for everybody. Even though our careers have been so different from theirs, every time we see them I’m reminded of being welcoming, being kind, warm and being at the top of your game. It’s very possible. They’ve set such a good example.
20. What is one piece of advice you’d give to your younger self?
Jahan: This sounds so cliche and trite, but I would say trust yourself and put the energy and effort into cultivating a relationship with yourself. There are a lot of times when I look at my teenage years and my early 20s, where I felt very disconnected from who I was and my own inner truth.
Yasmine: Stop waiting. Do it right now… I’ll always have this self-doubt of like “Should I? Can I? Am I capable? Do I have the skill?” It’s like, just do it now. Start it now.
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