On Her Good New Album ‘My Technique Actor,’ Nilüfer Yanya Steps Absolutely Into the Limelight

Equally, at a time when the thought of the “period” has pervaded the tradition to such an extent that the highest-grossing tour of all time is all about these dramatic album-to-album pivots, it’s refreshing to see an artist take a special, equally confident method—certainly one of quiet, thought of evolution. My Technique Actor could also be unmistakably a Nilüfer Yanya album, however its tone additionally feels markedly totally different from what’s come earlier than. As a substitute of taking the sudden digital parts of her earlier file, Painless, to extra dramatic heights, Yanya dials them again to create a sonic panorama that’s each delicate and plush, flitting between moments of just about spartan vacancy and dense, atmospheric strings or the unfastened strum of a guitar. “Exploring the softness, I feel that’s a brand new factor for me,” Yanya says. “And as an alternative of making an attempt to be intelligent with the songwriting, it’s like we had been making an attempt to simplify it.”

On repeat listens, the album additionally begins to look a bit of cryptic. Because the lyrics unfurl, they appear much less like excavations from the depths of Yanya’s inside world, and extra like vignettes from the lives of somebody she might need handed on the road, or seen sitting in a restaurant. (“Gonna scream out, there’s no which means / Spit my tooth out as you’re bleeding / I gave you all the things you wanted,” she sings with ferocity on the album’s title monitor, which has a contact of the surreal.) The clue to unlocking all of it might lie in that title. “I grew to become actually fascinated with the idea behind technique performing, and the truth that you’re sort of not performing, since you’ve grow to be the character and the character has grow to be you. You’re utilizing your individual reminiscences to grow to be them, and I relate to that loads in music, in writing, in performing. However I don’t actually have a personality to grow to be—I simply have to actually use myself to grow to be extra of myself. It’s not the identical factor, however there’s a correlation.”

That’s to not say that there aren’t different, extra ambiguous personas that Yanya slips into and embodies all through My Technique Actor. “I feel there are lots of hints on the album round reminiscence being made up of different individuals’s reminiscences, and the way your reminiscences shift the best way you see the world,” she provides. “And generally they misinform you—so that you at all times need to be studying and unlearning these reminiscences.”