A hammer can break and it can mend. On the cover of her debut album, With a Hammer, Yaeji wields her own mallet. The Korean-American artist’s face is calm, but the cute smirk drawn on to the tool has an air of playful menace. Is she going to use it to destroy or create? A glance over her shoulder is an invitation for us to follow her and find out.
With a Hammer is Yaeji’s debut full-length album, but the 30-year-old singer-producer-DJ spent her 20s becoming a rising star of New York’s underground club scene. Along the way, she occasionally spilled over into the mainstream – with her party anthem Raingurl or her cover of Drake’s Passionfruit. But With a Hammer marks a renovation of her musical identity.
Growing up between the US and South Korea, Yaeji has said she felt isolated in both countries; not quite fitting into either culture. With a Hammer was created during the pandemic, when anti-Asian hate crimes increased by 77% in the US, and Yaeji has spoken at length about how she reckoned with her painful history during that time. During the making of With a Hammer, she said she kept a real hammer close to hand in the studio, and its weighty presence is felt on an album that both defends and attacks. Across 13 bilingual songs, Yaeji moves through a lifetime of hurt, confusion and resentment. “Why are we the ones to always run away? / Why are we the ones to always apologise? / Why are we the ones to make ourselves smaller?” she raps in Korean on Fever, a song about “yellow fever”, whereby non-Asian people sexually fetishise Asian people for their race. Elsewhere she rallies for social change, as with the catchy chant of Done (Let’s Get It): “Let’s get it done, I want it done, it’s our freedom.”
Lyrically the songs explode with feeling, but Yaeji’s production is controlled and often pared back. Submerge FM opens the album with a flute that trills like birdsong, before a steady drum beat kicks in and Yaeji whispers as though she’s confessing secrets. With a Hammer takes more inspiration from pop structures than her previous EPs – the songs carefully fitted out with synths, woodwind and tidy vocal melodies – and lyrics are sung like mantras. But she leaves windows for tenderness: “Even though we don’t share / The same mother tongue / I’ll write it down for you / I’ll keep it out for you / I’ll remember for you,” she whisper-sings on I’ll Remember for Me, I’ll Remember for You, while brass instruments cradle the song.
But sometimes, even two languages cannot always adequately express a feeling and, on Passed Me By, she sings a chorus that breaks down into pure wordless sound. On the back half of the album, Yaeji welcomes other musicians into her world: Baltimore-born singer-producer Nourished by Time on Happy and British electronic artist Loraine James on 1 Thing to Smash, reaching beyond herself and into the embrace of community. On With a Hammer, Yaeji transforms a painful history into a creative tool, and on the title track, she releases the tension that has been accumulating across the album. “There were days I gave up / And put a mask on my face, brain and heart,” she sings in a deep hush. Now, she sings, it’s “time to wake up from my dream”. Healing takes time, and Yaeji understands the power of music that holds space for mending. And then she is ready to swing again.
