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In the autumn of 2022, Nilüfer Yanya found herself at a crossroads. The British singer-songwriter—whose first two albums of intricate, emotionally charged indie pop had marked her as a fast-rising star with an unusual cross-genre appeal—was finally able to step off the endless hamster wheel of songwriting, recording, promoting, and performing. For the first time in her career, she had the opportunity to press pause and consider her next steps with real clarity of mind.
It was a little daunting. “I think I’ve become more observant of how I work,” Yanya says. “I didn’t want to rush back into writing another album because it’s important to have a breather in between. But I didn’t really have a broader understanding of the process before. Now, by the third album, I kind of get it. I understand my habits a bit more.” Given the challenges facing touring musicians post-pandemic, determining when things felt stable enough for Yanya to take that step back was a trick. “It took a while to get to that point,” she continues. “No creative job is ever super secure. So you really have to feel it from within, without getting too deep. You have to be able to say, ‘No, I’ve got this. This is fine.’ You’re allowed to do that.”
You can hear the rich rewards of that downtime on Yanya’s breathtaking new album, My Method Actor, released today on her new label Ninja Tune. Across 11 tracks, she doubles down on her signatures: guitar playing that veers from a grungy, reverb-laden fuzz to intricate acoustic noodling; playful percussion that can sound as much like classic rock drumming as it can delicate, syncopated trip-hop; her quietly devastating way with lyrics. (Plus, of course, there’s Yanya’s smoky, androgynous voice, which possesses a searing intimacy that makes you feel like you’re listening in on a secret.) This masterful blending of genres gives the album a quality that sounds slightly out of time, but also, somehow, firmly of the moment.
Similarly, at a time when the idea of the “era” has pervaded the culture 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 different, equally self-assured approach—one of quiet, considered evolution. My Method Actor may be unmistakably a Nilüfer Yanya album, but its tone also feels markedly different from what’s come before. Instead of taking the unexpected electronic elements of her previous record, Painless, to more dramatic heights, Yanya dials them back to create a sonic landscape that is both subtle and lush, flitting between moments of almost spartan emptiness and dense, atmospheric strings or the loose strum of a guitar. “Exploring the softness, I think that’s a new thing for me,” Yanya says. “And instead of trying to be clever with the songwriting, it’s like we were trying to simplify it.”
Strangely, on repeat listens, the album only becomes even more cryptic. Let the lyrics unfurl, and they feel less like excavations from the depths of Yanya’s inner world, and more like vignettes from the lives of someone she might have passed on the street, or seen sitting in a cafe. (“Gonna scream out, there’s no meaning / Spit my teeth out as you’re bleeding / I gave you everything you needed,” she sings with ferocity on the album’s title track, which has a touch of the surreal.) The clue to unlocking it all may lie in that title. “I became really fascinated with the theory behind method acting, and the fact that you’re kind of no longer acting, because you’ve become the character and the character has become you. You’re using your own memories to become them, and I relate to that a lot in music, in writing, in performing. But I don’t really have a character to become—I just have to really use myself to become more of myself. It’s not the same thing, but there’s a correlation.”
That’s not to say that there aren’t other, more ambiguous personas that Yanya slips into and embodies throughout My Method Actor. “I think there are a lot of hints on the album around memory being made up of other people’s memories, and how your memories shift the way you see the world,” she adds. “And sometimes they lie to you—so you always have to be learning and unlearning those memories.”
The area in which Yanya perhaps feels that split most keenly is while performing live. The Yanya who steps out in a T-shirt, guitar slung around her neck, to command the stage is certainly not the same Yanya who sits in her flat writing the songs in their earliest form. “The side of me that’s writing the music is so different from the side of me that’s agreed to walk out on stage and perform in front of people,” she says. “It’s a totally different part of me, but it’s still me.”
It must be strange, I imagine, to write these deeply personal songs—sometimes based on highly emotional or even traumatic experiences—and then perform them in front of a crowd night after night, for weeks on end, while on tour. “It’s weird, because sometimes you don’t feel anything when you’re on stage, and sometimes you do. Whenever I watch other people’s shows, I’m always thinking about whether they’re actually feeling it, or if it’s just another day at work. I guess it’s about finding a balance. You’ve got to have something that’s sustainable that you can do every night, even if you also want to be able to bring this deeper part of it to make it mean something to you—not even just the audience. Because otherwise, after a while, you might feel like a shell.”
Given the sheer emotional force of Yanya’s music, you get the sense that “feeling like a shell” is decidedly not the state of mind she’d want to be in while writing or performing. The intimacy of her work can be attributed at least in part, to Yanya’s profound creative relationship with her collaborator on the album, composer and producer Wilma Archer. “I think we’re both naturally quite reserved, sensitive people, and it took a while for us to trust each other,” Yanya says. (While Yanya worked with producers including John Congleton and Dave Okumu across her first two records, My Method Actor features Archer as her sole co-writer and producer.) “By not working with other people, you only really have to care about each other’s opinions. You don’t have to keep opening up the ideas, you just can go—and after a while, you get into a flow of your instinctive patterns. It’s almost the closest you can get to just working by yourself, and that’s what makes it both intense and challenging.”
And sure, the album does have its more intense—and challenging—moments: just take the thrilling distorted guitar riff on lead single “Like I Say (Runaway),” a song about growing up and friendship and the different forks in the road of life you may end up taking. (Fittingly, the music video features Yanya as a runaway bride.) But it’s on the standout track “Ready for Sun (Touch)” that Yanya’s vision seems to come most vividly into focus: over a rattling staccato, she croons about chasing her own shadow with a twinge of melancholy. Then an achingly beautiful string melody hits, and Yanya’s voice seems to open up, ready to let the light in. “Heavy on my mind / Share it in the light / Beautiful scars / That’s all she’s got,” she sings—and then, simply: “Ready for sun.” It’s one of a handful of moments that suggest a kind of turning point for Yanya, as she enters her 30s and embarks on a new chapter in her career.
Despite the record’s darker moments, then, does Yanya see My Method Actor as something ultimately hopeful? “Yeah, I think it is,” she says after a pause. “It’s optimistic. I think it’s looking forward, and I wanted it to feel open-ended. I keep thinking about the album as a journey—and it’s like you just keep going, going, going…”
