There was a moment when I watching Nilufer Yanya last week at the Brudenell in Leeds, when I was hit by a strong question – what am I watching? What is this music? Yanya has been doing a few in-store stripped back sets promoting her third album, My Method Actor, which dropped last Friday.
She had been expecting that the Leeds date, like the others, were a genuine in-store in a record store or similar – and seemed a bit bemused and slightly wrong-footed to start to realise it felt more like a proper gig. She had no drummer, with only two (very adept) musicians with her, one on sax and keys, the other on bass/guitar. I was expecting, as a result, to find the songs I already knew – four or five of them had already been slipping out the last few months – to feel a little underpowered. How wrong I was. If anything, they revealed themselves even more clearly – Yanya’s gosssamer light, murmured, throaty vocal hung in the air with surprising power, and the knotty construction of her clever, brilliant songs seemed so logical when you hear them live. But I was still nagging away at that question: what is this? Girl with guitar and vocals, quite angsty lyrics. Indie guitar music right? Not really. There’s a proggy-ness to the way she plays guitar at times, and her chord structures are angular and surprising in a way that feels more like jazz than pop music. Let’s throw post-rock into the mix too just for fun.She clearly plays with different tunings for different songs and was having to retune her guitar in between (she started to relax and displayed a lovely goofiness with her interactions with the audience that were wonderfully at odds with the intensity of her performance). I still don’t know what this is. Of course, in the post-Spotify era, why should this matter? Every artist is a jukebox of influences. But I think I want to know why because I want to understand why this is such a special album – because let’s be clear, I am completely blown away by this extraordinary record.
Nilufer Yanya burst onto the scene in 2019 with her much-lauded debut album Miss Universe. She seemed to arrive fully formed, comfortably living in a sound that seemed part confessional angular indie of early PJ Harvey, and part something less easy to categorise. I liked her immediately, though I found her follow-up Painless not quite as powerful and it didn’t quite stay with me.
Maybe it’s easy to say this when an artist finally delivers the perfect record in your own musical wheelhouse, but though I’ve really tracks of hers in the past, I’ve always had the feeling that her albums can feel a bit disjointed, and I like some tracks more than others. So when she released the first single from this album early this year, the astonishing Like I Say (I Runaway), I was pretty excited. It was, as they say, an absolute banger, and right now, I think it’s going to be my song of the year.
Every song that’s followed this one has been just as intriguing, and crucially, they’ve all felt part of a maturing and a broadening of Yanya’s sound. But nothing prepared me for what those songs would sound like in the context of a whole album. Even the songs I’ve smashed to death like Like I Say and My Method Actor sound fresh and new when you hear the sequencing of this record. And let’s talk about the sequencing. Is there a better opener than Keep on Dancing this year – crisp, taut, desperate, urgent – all the things this album is about, finding yourself in your late 20s, broken relationships, fears about yourself, about how you present yourself (hence Method Actor). Then onto Like I Say which now sounds like the things it was born to do – to take you into the album as a whole. To follow that with Method Actor feels almost rude – the disgustingly fantastic guitar on that song should be against the law.
You’d think the album might be front loading the goodies, and I did worry a little on first listens that the second half was a more languid, slow-burn affair. But as each song opens itself on repeated listens, it starts to dawn on you – or it did on me anyway – that there isn’t. bad moment on this tight, brilliant 11 songs, 44 minute masterpiece. I could go on about individual tracks, but we can do that on the pod. But I have to say that the Robert Fripp prog drone guitar on Call It Love almost makes me scream with joy every time I hear it!
Shout to Yanya’s collaborator Wilma Archer, about whom I know little – but he has clearly found a way to showcase Yanya’s brilliance to full effect, and Yanya has been very effusive about his role in the record. His background in electronic music is the key to this I think – there is openness and a simplicity about the songs’ arrangements that allow the songwriting and Yanya’s lovely vocals to shine. You hear every instrument, every line. It’s a triumph.
So yeah, I’m a fan. It’s in my top 3 for the year. It might even take the top spot. I might, in fact, need to take a break soon because I can’t get enough of it. How about you, brothers…?
thisisnothappening.net 
This is the one we’ve all been waiting for, isn’t it? It didn’t matter when it came out, it was just a question of who would have it as their album when the release date landed. Because when Like I Say (Runaway) arrived in April, it was hard not to get a bit carried away. The wheel spun, and David got to pick. Lovely write up!
Joey’s the one that gets the nod for bringing her to my attention (hiya: https://thisisnothappening.net/2020/11/13/re-introducing-nilufer-yanya/) because while he and David talked about her previous albums, I can’t remember them in the way I remember Crash. It was close to his song of the year in 2020 (losing out to Arlo Parks, whatever happened to her?) and it was instantly joyous when I went back to it this week. I remember thinking ‘who is this artist, and what is their sound?’. Because with Crash’s distorted question and march-like rhythms, heavy on the low end, it was striking but I couldn’t tell 100% what I was listening to. And having skimmed the first two albums, it wasn’t that clear then either. This isn’t a negative, but those sound like finding feet in a way that My Method Actor is someone effortlessly at the top of their game.
Make no mistake: this album is fantastic. The singles, as they rolled out – Like I Say (Runaway)’s rasping guitars and percussive hits, leaping into a wall of sound and feedback, all energy and vitriol, through to Just A Western, its faint country-adjacent melodies and insistent, atmospheric builds – all shone above so much else that was around through the spring and summer. Yanya sounded here like she’d suddenly coalesced around something she was sure about, that just emanated from her effortlessly. And seeing those 6 tracks – over half the album – fit seamlessly into the album as a whole was even more pleasurable as getting to know them individually.
As David’s said, perhaps the real find has been a producer and co-writer in Wilma Archer that leans into her skills but complements them beautifully. Some of the rougher edges and more jarring genre jumps and percussion from earlier records have been replaced by a fully realised piece of work that still zips around between pace and styles, but all sounds like a single artist. I’ve listened to this album a good dozen times in the last fortnight and it’s hard to find fault with it and hard to think how you’d alter it in any way. That’s much harder to achieve – oh hello, sequencing and production chat! – than records like this make it seem. There’s a sound and, much more than that, a feel that inhabits this album that really doesn’t feel like anyone else. There’s echoes of all sorts of artists in there, from Bon Iver and PJ Harvey (great shout, brother David), to Radiohead (with some of the percussive touches) and even Coldplay (don’t swear, David, it’s the feintest nod to their very good early stuff), but nothing truly sounds like Nilufer Yanya on this record. That’s some feat.
There’s so much going on here that’s interesting, lush layers of sound across all the tracks, but some stand out particularly. The percussion on this record is sublime (hello Mutations and Ready for Sun, in particular), as are the drones, synths and even strings. Most of this is played by Archer – who worked as far back with Yanya as 2020, and has also been part of Sudan Archives’ debut album Athena (a nice TINH callback), and on Jessie Ware’s Devotion (and another!) – and it seems to have brought the alchemy of the best parts of Yanya’s skills together and elevated it hugely. But make no mistake, it’s Nilufer that’s the power behind the record: her distinctive vocals, switching between sultry half-whisper, beguiling harmonies, direct and confrontational, and desolate laments that give so much of the emotion to the eleven tracks. Her guitar playing is simple at first glance but there’s richness to it, and I love how you can often hear the fingers slide between frets. There’s something very immediate to it all.
And you can listen to this so easily, let it wash over you, but it’s getting into the lyrics that also changes this record too. Because it’s an album full of heartbreak and turmoil, even as it’s woven into entrancing melodies and sonic layers that disguise the tumult. It’s always something we love here when the melody and delivery is sublime and the lyrics pack a punch that isn’t visible at first. This is here in spades, as much love and loss – ‘I know you’re going to meet her / she’s coming to your rescue’ on Like I Say – as anger and hurt, and raw emotions at the fore all the way through it – ‘some call it love….. I call it shame / heating me up’ on Some Call It Love – there’s no holding back right across the album. The sequencing is subtle too, with a set of shorter, more propulsive songs at the start that leads into a middle group of longer, slower songs before the end picks up again, almost aware of not wanting to let the intensity fade. It’s all done with so much attention – I feel, at least – but in a way that sounds so flowing and free.
It’s always so great to see an artist with such promise come out with a work that – hopefully – will propel them towards attention they truly deserve, and this is surely that for Nilufer Yanya. I can’t wait to see her play these songs live in December.