Nilüfer Yanya has always thrilled by keeping us guessing. After a handful of EPs that set her up as a King Krule type, fiddling around in a jazzy indie haze, the Londoner’s debut album, 2019’s Miss Universe, built a minor alt-pop classic around, loosely, the concept of a dystopian health corporation and a wellness hotline. Even within that notion, though, it refused to stick to a rigid path, wandering off into indie-rock, house, pop and soul, finding plenty of other anxieties and ideas to explore.
Her second album Painless honed her vision. This one took longer to needle its way under my skin than her debut did, but when it got there, it hooked on and refused to let go. What it lacks in immediacy it more than makes up for in directness, and its after effects linger long past its lean running time. This is a more muscular version of Yanya’s sound, with more space and fewer adornments. She steps up to the challenge of having nowhere to hide, and there is a resolve here that gives the impression of an artist firmly and confidently finding her feet.
It can at times be a painful listen, but Yanya’s refusal to back down from the ugliness and complexity of raw emotions, particularly when it comes to love, is bracing and compulsive. Opener The Dealer takes a skittish, big-beat foundation and adds only a guitar and Yanya’s voice, until a melodic bass takes over to beef up the chorus. That’s about all there is to it, musically. But throughout the record, Yanya does impressive things with sparse components, finding urgency in panicky rhythms, lurching from uncertainty to determination, and back again.
She has mastered building pressure and then coolly controlling its release. This is at its best on album highlight Belong With You, a contrary to-and-fro about a relationship in decline. The verses list all the reasons why it should be over (“I don’t even like you, bitch”; “I’m not into you one bit”) while the chorus swirls around a repeated “I belong with you” that is as hopeless and pleading as it is euphoric. The whole thing comes crashing down in a crunchy, grungy guitar part, and it’s all over in under three minutes.
Painless is a magnificent exercise in melancholy that makes the most of Yanya’s range without ever overdoing it. The icy L/R begins with a near-robotic, staccato delivery of a pointed accusation disguised as a shrug – “Sometimes it feels like you’re so violent, autopilot” – before its frostiness falls away into a sad and beautiful refrain. “Whatever makes you happy, I don’t think I’ll ever know,” she sings, lifting her voice out of that deadpan lower range into a higher, more soulful melody – the song’s heart crashing in like a wave.
There is the Radiohead-meets-trip-hop groove of Midnight Sun, the boyband-ballad-gone-awry framework of Shameless, the rapid, claustrophobic wallop of Stabilise, which dips into spoken-word and comes away with its dignity intact. Painless has the intimacy of late-night voicenotes, sent in haste, with the potential for regret lingering like stale smoke in the air. It is cool and tough, warm and open, frank and conflicted about what it is trying to say, often within the same song. It is the sound of Yanya hitting new heights.
