Lous and The Yakuzas

Lous and The Yakuza is a Congolese-Belgian artist. She released her first album called “Gore” last October and she became a real phenomenon very quickly. She is a very interesting artist with amazing video clips, just at the beginning of her career and you shouldn’t miss her!

Her real name is Marrie-Pierra Kakoma. She was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996 from a Congolese father and a Rwandese mother. Her mother went to jail for two months because of her ethnicity during the war in Congo in 2000. The whole family moved to Rwanda in 2005 before going to Brussels in 2011.

In addition to the different cultures she grew up with, Lous and The Yakuza is influenced by Japanese culture which explains her artist name. The Yakuzas are people involved in a Japanese crime syndicate. Hence, Yakuzas are gangsters. Lous and The Yakuza talks about Yakuzas to talk about people from her team. Furthermore, she can be seen with a symbol painted on her forehead which takes the form of a “Y” with a dot on top. She describes it as a symbol of the connection between the sky and the earth which was inspired by her faith in God.

The style of her new album “Gore” is a mix of different influences between hip-hop and trap or even pop music with a good rhythm and different topics such as paradoxical feelings in her single “Dilemme” or racism in her music “Solo”. In her album, she mostly sings in French but she explained in interviews that it was the first time for her that she wrote her texts in French.

Besides her music, she is also a painter. She shares her drawings on Instagram (@lousandtheyakuza) sometimes. She is usually discussing societal issues during interviews such as racism and feminism. Finally, during the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in Belgium, she was very engaged on Instagram but also during the demonstrations in Brussels.

She made a short documentary about her and the construction of her album on youtube separated in several short videos: