Nilüfer Yanya is less interested in naming the feeling than learning to trust it. It’s not always a straightforward path; her songs have a way of winding around a range of themes and emotional states, finding warmth and purpose in the in-between where others would see a maze of unanswerable questions. “There’s nothing out there/ For you and me/ I’m going nowhere/ Until it bleeds,” the London-based singer-songwriter sang on the chorus of ‘shameless’, a highlight from her excellent 2022 LP PAINLESS, and it’s the same nothings and nowheres that creep up on her latest effort, My Method Actor, whether she’s chasing storms or some semblance of certainty. But Yanya moves into it – and kineticism has been as crucial a component of her music as anxiety and exhaustion – with a deeper sense of confidence and intentionality, beginning with the declaration: “What you looking for?/ Shut up and raise your glass if you’re not sure.” The nature of Yanya’s songs is often interpersonal, if not exactly conversational, but the “you” stands for way more than a single person: it’s as much about self-discovery as it is about community. “People like you and me get jaded/ People like us our dreams get faded,” she sings on ‘Method Actor’.
Yanya knows those are the kinds of people who tend to listen close, and My Method Actor is a record that requires close listening. That’s not to say its complexities makes for a difficult or particularly demanding listening experience – like Yanya’s previous releases, it’s easy to get lost in. But like its predecessor, the album further tightens and refines Yanya’s approach, first and foremost by narrowing her pool of contributors. Her longtime collaborator Will Archer helped write and record the songs across London, Wales, and Eastbourne, and Yanya credits the album’s intensity to working within their creative bubble. It’s also certainly why My Method Actor feels more cohesive and streamlined, a fact that doesn’t dull its impact so much as give space for Yanya to focus on its emotional flow – and for the listener to better register it.
And when they do open things up to other musicians, for instance, by way of string arrangements – written by Archer – the effect is all the more pronounced. Yanya is an expert at capturing the nuances of human dynamics, and few of her songs achieve this better than ‘Mutations’: sliding from a nimble rhythm to what sounds like open guitar chords as the singer calls herself “unbound,” then leaning back in with an insistent groove (“Don’t stop, please just listen”), and finally a cello, played by Clíona Ní Choileáin, to accentuate the pleading. The same instrument helps illuminate ‘Ready for Sun (touch)’, which is searching and weightier – even though it’s anchored by no percussion except a faint, staticky pulse, it yields the biggest revelations: the beauty in pain, a chance to fill the void. And then there’s Ellie Consta’s violin tracing the kind of mourning that eludes language on ‘Faith’s Late’, making it potent and palpable.
But it is, of course, Yanya and Archer who are responsible for most of the magic here: richly rendering each emotional shift, colouring in the imagery that guides the lyrics, navigating it all. When she asks, “Can you tell I’m torn now baby?,” she seems to be directly provoked by the distorted guitars crashing through, the ones that also turn the sonic equivalent of a clenched jaw on ‘Method Actor’ into spitting, not just words, but teeth out. ‘Just a Western’ is aptly titled for its cinematic arrangement, but it’s the seemingly small decisions – the tone of the classical guitar, Archer’s unexpected backing vocals – that give it shape. The pair are so careful with the vocal layering that three lines in ‘Call It Love’, coming one after the other, are given a slightly different treatment. This intensity of detail and exploration is necessary, in part, because of how My Method Actor mirrors a lot of the same questions and tendencies as PAINLESS, though it’s clear that Yanya is a different person. “You know I’m not ashamed to jump in/ To find a darker shade of nothing,” she asserts on ‘Made Out of Memory’. So what, Yanya seems to provoke, if nothing’s all we end up with, if the end is our only destiny? Look at all we’ve wrung out in the process.