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…?
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