“What you looking for? Shut up and raise your glass if you’re not sure.” From its very first line, Nilüfer Yanya’s third album, [record name] asks questions with no easy answers. It is a supple, expansive body of work that peers into the crevices of life, exploring them with comforting strings, skittering beats, soul-tinged melodies and swooning harmonies. It asks, who are we? Why do we follow the paths we follow? What is at the heart of it all?
A singer-songwriter from London, Yanya grew up in a creative family – both her parents are visual artists – and has always channelled her emotions and questions about life into music. Her first album “Miss Universe” and its 2022 follow-up “Painless” cemented her as one of the UK’s most interesting and thoughtful songwriters, lauded by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Since her debut, she has performed on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Stephen Colbert, Later with Jools Holland and NPR’s legendary Tiny Desk, opened for artists as varied as Adele, the XX and Mitski, and sold out her own headlining shows across Europe, Australia, Japan and the USA.
As someone who understands the enormous value of creative expression, Nilüfer is also the founding member of the community project Artists In Transit, which offers creative workshops and other support to displaced communities. AIT began by offering workshops at a refugee camp in Greece in 2015, and since then has offered over 100 artistic experiences to children and young people experiencing the immigration system in Europe. During Covid-19, it also provided over 500 lockdown art packages to children living across London.
With this wealth of experience under her belt, Nilüfer retreated into the studio with her creative partner, Will Archer. She had toured her second album, Painless, for a year and entered a period of transition, between albums, between record companies, between homes. [Record name] deals a lot with the idea of movement from one part of life and into another. Even before she began thinking about writing, Yanya was questioning her own impulses. “You know, you want to give yourself some time,” she recalls thinking when she finished the Painless cycle, “But then you’re like, how much is the right amount of time before you should start the next thing?”
The seeds of [Record name] were planted in early 2023, but it wasn’t until the spring of that year that shoots began to appear. As songs started to form, Yanya and Archer squirrelled themselves away from the world. “This is the most intense album, in that respect,” Yanya says. “Because it’s only been us two. We didn’t let anyone else into the bubble.” They wrote and recorded in small sessions, spread across London, Wales and Eastbourne.
The bubble was a safe space. No expectations, no feedback, just the freedom to follow their own creative impulses in whatever direction they took them. Archer brought the music to the table while Nilüfer wrote melodies and lyrics that sometimes float over the top, sometimes slalom through beats and always delve into the biggest questions. You can feel this cocooning of creative energy in the atmosphere of the record: it envelopes you entirely in cinematic sweeps while feeling intimate, finally inviting you into the little world they created and offering up its secrets.
“The only intention we set was let’s just do this together, just us two.
Website |
Instagram |
Twitter |
Facebook
