Emerging artist Naomi Yanos is obsessive, private, and in control. Their debut album, Into the Icebox, is released today, February 20th. Into the Icebox isn’t about Yanos entering the icebox; it's the listener entering a wild psyche that has been carefully contained. Ironically, an album about being unable to let anyone in invites all listeners to the party. 

 

The need for total control shows up even in the creation of the album. Yanos does nearly everything on Into the Icebox: production, engineering, mixing, and all instruments, except guitar on two songs and drum recordings (that were engineered and sampled by Yanos). 

 

Into the Icebox is lyrically arresting, sometimes aggressive, sometimes gentle, and sometimes tongue-in-cheek. “Roadkill with my bedroom eyes,” Yanos sings on “Discoball Dress”, “I know what it's like to be dead inside.” More devastatingly, on “Underwear,” Yanos sings about teenage friends succumbing to drug addiction, “I’m inside a seashell on the beach, and every overdose is just sand falling through.” 

 

Yanos is a native New Yorker who spent their high school years playing open mics three times a week and touring alongside legends such as Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, Jon Anderson of Yes, and Gibby Hanes of the Butthole Surfers with their Rock troop. Upon arriving at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, Yanos began performing at intimate venues where the crowd could unleash. Over the past four years, since their enrollment, Yanos has been steadily building a fan base. In 2025, they saw a 1,035% increase in Spotify listeners, with a total of 71k streams on the platform over the year.