There have yet to be reports of Nilüfer Yanya refusing to answer to her own name, terrifying production assistants, or exhibiting any of the demanding off-camera behaviour once expected of Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis and other master thespians. Nevertheless, the notion of the method actor is a potent one for the London singer-songwriter. She’s spoken of the kinship she feels with these counterparts’ determination to ground performances in personal experiences and memories of trauma, essentially re-living those emotions in order to lend authenticity and urgency to present-day expressions. She sees her songs as a potential means to do the same.
Another anxiety well-known to actors – or, indeed, to anyone who spends too much time on social media – surfaces throughout her third album as she captures and ponders instances of slippage between the versions of herself that are public and private, and of transitions between earlier, younger selves and who she is in the now. She often expresses a measure of uncertainty about what constitutes “my new costume” as she calls it in “Method Actor“, along with the worry expressed in “Binding” that “I’m hardly here.” Such lyrics lend additional resonance to My Method Actor‘s cover image of Yanya perched on a bathroom counter, straining to get a look at herself in the mirror over her shoulder, as if looking for some reassurance that she’s present and accounted for.
But however often and astutely Yanya express her fears as she considers those thorny questions of self and identity, the music itself demonstrates a rather sturdier constitution as the work of an artist whose confidence continues to grow in leaps and bounds. Adventurous, affecting, yet boasting the same immediacy that made its two predecessors so satisfying, My Method Actor feels exactly like what it wants to be.
Extending the close collaboration with musician, co-writer and producer Will Archer that began on her 2019 debut Miss Universe and continued with much of 2022’s Painless, Yanya demonstrates an appealing eagerness to depart from the more familiar indie-rock conventions of earlier releases and experiment with more densely textured arrangements. There’s a roughening-up of some of the softer edges, along with a greater integration of electronic and discordant elements within the folk and pop structures that have been fundamental to her work since breakouts like 2017’s “Plant Food” EP.
Even with the burlier, more guitar-forward songs at the new album’s onset, she pushes beyond terrain that may now seem overly trammeled by the many post-millennials bent on rewriting “Last Nite” or retooling “Cannonball” and “Divine Hammer” for their own purposes. (To be fair to Gen Z’s preeminent purveyor of Breeders revivalism, Olivia Rodrigo acknowledged her debt by inviting the Deal sisters to join her on tour.) Instead, Yanya and Archer delight in pushing levels into the red, smearing the most intense moments of “Like I Say (I Runaway)” and “Method Actor” with Kevin Shields-worthy levels of fuzz and distortion. A nervier quality emerges in the rhythms underpinning the songs too, as the skittish beats under “Keep On Dancing” accentuate the feelings of agitation and doubt she conveys throughout the lyrics (“until you smile I’m fucking miserable“).
A plaintive plea from a character desperate to feel something other than damaged and hollow, “Binding” evokes Elliott Smith at his most delicate and desolate. At the same time, it also marks the album’s shift toward the alternately dreamy and steely electronic soul that was Archer’s forte when he was recording under the moniker of Slime. Likewise, the blend of yearning and resignation in Yanya’s oft-multi-tracked voice in “Mutations” and “Ready For Sun (Touch)” highlights the correlation between My Method Actor‘s most melancholy passages and Tracey Thorn‘s haunted-dancefloor balladry for Massive Attack and post-“Missing” Everything But The Girl. The melancholy mood extends through “Call It Love” and “Faith’s Late“, though Yanya and Archer maintain the prevailing air of unpredictability by equipping the former with Robert Fripp-like curlicues of heavily processed guitar and augmenting the latter with an achingly gorgeous, string-laden coda.
And even though My Method Actor‘s own later stages are somewhat hampered by a uniformity of pace and vibe – a flaw it shares with the otherwise sterling Painless – “Made Out Of Memory” and “Just A Western” prove that the knack for warm-hearted melodicism Yanya established on Miss Universe remains very much intact. Indeed, for all the dark corners of her ever-changing self she avidly explores, the intrinsic brightness and irrepressible energies in her songwriting continues to enrich the experience of accompanying her.
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