Nilüfer Yanya’s 2019 debut album, Miss Universe, was a thrilling mess of ideas. It came bound together by a concept satirising the wellness industry – fake adverts between tracks, press releases that purported to be communiques from a company called Wway Health – that was less interesting than the music it contained. Then again, you could see why Yanya thought the music needed tying together somehow. Its contents jumped from ragged alt-rock to radio-friendly pop to lo-fi takes on 80s soft rock: there were traces of house music alongside cathartic old-fashioned indie, jagged guitars co-existed with the smooth sound of the saxophone, played by her impressively named foil Jazzi Bobbi.
It was justly critically acclaimed: Yanya was clearly a skilled songwriter regardless of whatever genre she was toying with. But it was also audibly a debut album, the unmistakable sound of a young artist with eclectic taste letting everything they had absorbed in their teens gush forth. It’s an entirely understandable thing to do: who knows if your first chance to make an album that reaches a mass audience might also be your last?
Three years on, Painless is audibly a second album, the product of an artist with eclectic tastes spending their time focusing and refining their talent – as if its author has developed the confidence to decide that less is sometimes more. Opener The Dealer does a lot with almost nothing more than a slackly strummed electric guitar, a crunchy breakbeat and some ghostly curls of synthesiser. It’s so minimal that when the bass starts playing during the chorus, it feels like a sonic eruption: it’s also a fantastic song.
There’s also the sense of someone peeling layers away in order to concentrate on the kind of subtle details that repay repeat listening: the vocals that shift from speaker to speaker in L/R; the brief moment in Shameless where everything else drops away, leaving only a piano overlaid with drones; the understated shifts in the texture of Belong With You’s backing. Yanya’s voice, which on Miss Universe had a tendency to rocket between a bruised croon and a faintly unnerving falsetto, feels cooler, settling into a space between breathy vulnerability and something tougher, a kind of nonchalant mumble that frequently mangles her lyrics into a semi-comprehensible state. And the falsetto is deployed more sparingly – and to greater impact, as when it ratchets up the tension on Chase Me.
There’s no superfluous concept attached. It holds together as it is, rooting its sound in the left-field guitar rock of the late 80s and early 90s without ever feeling beholden to it: a case of someone adapting inspirations to her own ends rather than re-creating. You assume Yanya likes the Breeders – listen to the dynamic shifts in Midnight Sun or Belong With You – and there’s no mistaking the echo of shoegaze in the thick, misty guitar textures, or in the gusts of scraping noise that blow through Trouble. But Yanya replaces that genre’s swooning, stoned languor with something more prickly and disquieting, which chimes with the mood of the words.
When you can make them out, the lyrics frequently seem to depict the songs’ protagonists succumbing to something or someone that they’re aware isn’t entirely healthy. “Take me out to the beach / Take off all your clothes / Whatever makes you happy,” she murmurs on L/R, a suggestion that jars with what’s come before: “Sometimes you’re so violent, autopilot.” The characters in Stabilise could be blissfully cocooned – there could be a lascivious smirk about the line “I’m going downstairs, I’ve got the keys, you’re going nowhere” – or they could just be trapped together: “I’m going nowhere until it bleeds.” On Shameless, meanwhile, she sounds like someone throwing caution to the wind in pursuit of a good time – “in these four walls we’re stateless … I’m shameless” – but the question of exactly how good a time she’s letting herself in for hangs heavy: “You can hate me if you feel like / You can hurt me if you feel like / If it feels good, then I’m alright.”
All this mystery is set to uniformly beautiful melodies. Around the time of Miss Universe’s release, interviewers tended to alight on the story of Yanya swerving an invitation to join a ghastly-sounding girl group manufactured by One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson. It clearly wasn’t an experience that put her off pop music – albeit pop music rendered in an intriguingly opaque manner: there’s nothing here that carries the straightforward sugar rush of her debut album’s Baby Blu. As with her musical forebears, Nilüfer Yanya seems interested only in doing it her way. As Painless plays, that very much feels like the right way.
This week Alexis listened to
Bartees Strange – Heavy Heart
Already established as pleasingly hard to pin down musically, Bartees Strange heads to 4AD with a fabulous song, distorted guitars and tumbling drums.
