Nilüfer Yanya
PAINLESS
ATO
ABOVE THE CURRENT
The city can be a real pressurizer. From needless confrontations to cramped apartments, it’s a lot of noise and not much room. On PAINLESS, London-based songwriter Nilüfer Yanya attempts to explore impossible puzzles of love and the self, all from this highly pressurized container. Out from these four walls she delivers serious vulnerability in an industrial and grungy emotional well of an album. Yanya’s first record, Miss Universe, dripped with loose, jazzy guitar work in an open, cyberworld of wellness—and to no one’s surprise, the parody of health promised by the fictional We Worry About Your Health hotlines featured in the album’s interludes did not provide our protagonist with any real cures. The cathartic writing on this new album, however, is seemingly the balm Yanya’s been searching for. With her maturity and creative flexibility, she uses knife-like precision to sculpt a record from intimate heartache.
Opener “the dealer” sets a tone of chaos with a high-speed blast from the get-go. Yanya sings about tanking a relationship (“Kind of patience that breaks your heart / Baby, it’s me that’s taking us apart”) accompanied by mechanically sharp drums and a drenched bass line. Her voice still comes across gorgeously, dipping between a balmy falsetto and a fresh, spoken crawl. “shameless” is another album highlight, a slow-burning meditation bursting from the claustrophobic city. This track’s sentiment of floating freely—detached and only bound by someone else—strikes a hot chord, revealing some of the most exposed moments in Yanya’s whole catalog. Meanwhile the first single, “midnight sun,” is gritty indie that ultimately releases into a massive catharsis that’s sure to become a live staple. The record then slows to a near halt, with Yanya expounding upon an unlikely love on “trouble,” an arpeggiated storm floating over a midnight pond.
PAINLESS is a polished record which wears its emotional openness on its metallic sleeves. Some of its depth is mired in the faster, tighter tunes, but Yanya reaches new heights on many of the slower tracks, including the closing single “anotherlife,” possibly the strongest on the whole record. On this, she sings, “In some kind of way I am lost / In another life I was not,” reminiscing on the love that could’ve worked out. She wants so badly for its return, but it’s gone, out of this reality. Yanya’s heart is still set on chewable, angsty pop, but she doesn’t fall for any trope without a self-aware, authentic slacker energy. Nothing recognizable stays so, as Yanya deftly collides her influences into pop gems which command the ear. Through this, she further solidifies herself as one of the most forward-thinking psychedelic indie-pop artists today.
