Yonatan Albalak was born in Jerusalem in 1983 and started playing guitar at nine. He trained at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, studying guitar under Steve Peskoff and composition under Slava Ganelin, and in 2006 he won Israel's Jazz Player Competition, which came with an America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship. He's been a working professional on the Tel Aviv music scene since 2009.

His catalog splits across several bands rather than a single leader identity. Geshem, his founding, flagship project, is an electro post-rock trio with vocalist/synth player Shuzin and drummer Aviv Cohen (who records solo as Solmonk); the band released Sungazing in 2018 on Ghostown Records and Nomad Fire in 2021. LayerZ, an earlier electronic trio with Gilad Abro and Aviv Cohen, put out Memory Towers (2013) and Things On Top Of Each Other (2015). Live Beat Tapes, another of his groups, released a singles compilation in 2015.

In 2019, trumpeter Avishai Cohen recruited Albalak into Big Vicious, an electric quintet built around Cohen's return to Israel after years in the US. Albalak plays guitar and bass in the band alongside guitarist Uzi Ramirez and drummers Aviv Cohen and Ziv Ravitz, the same Aviv Cohen from Geshem: the two Jerusalem natives have played together since the early 2000s, so the chemistry on Big Vicious's 2020 self-titled ECM debut, produced by Manfred Eicher at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France, was built on close to two decades of shared stage time rather than assembled fresh in the studio.

The following year, Albalak became the bassist in Apifera, a quartet with keyboardists Yuval Havkin (who records as Rejoicer) and Nitai Hershkovits, and drummer Amir Bresler. Signed to Stones Throw Records, Apifera released Overstand in 2020 and Keep The Outside Open in 2024.

Alongside his band work, Albalak has built a parallel career scoring film and television. He won the 2021 Ophir Award, the Israeli Academy's equivalent of the Oscar, for Best Original Score on the animated feature Legend of Destruction, co-composed with Assaf Talmudi, and picked up a second prize, Best Score, at the 2023 Jerusalem Film Festival for Daniel Auerbach. He's also performed with the Israel Jazz Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, leads his own trio with drummer Daniel Dor and bassist Yonatan Levy, and now teaches at the Tel Aviv Conservatory and Ono Academic College.

Albalak's playing sits at the intersection of jazz training and genres that rarely share a stage with it. His formal background is straight jazz guitar and composition, sharpened by a competition win and a scholarship, but his output runs through electronic music, psychedelic rock, ambient textures, and orchestral film scoring. Big Vicious, the project that connects him most directly to this project's other profiled artists, is built on exactly that same range: trip-hop grooves, ambient electronics, and rock textures layered under a jazz core, a sound Avishai Cohen has described as informed by his own return to Israel after years playing straight-ahead jazz in the US. Apifera works from the opposite direction, an acoustic-leaning quartet whose organic, mostly-live-take arrangements draw on Impressionist composers like Ravel and Satie as much as on jazz harmony.