The way plays the guitar, with a hollow picking, it’s like she’s scratching an incessant itch. It’s an intimate feeling to be let in on as a listener, but it’s also given her songs an occasional harried edge. The British indie musician’s first album, 2019’s , was raucous and bold, but when she sang of “lying in a pool of someone else’s blood,” you didn’t get the feeling she was exactly relaxed.
Her second album, 2022’s (a misdirection of a title if I ever heard one), throbbed with Yanya’s honeyed vocals wrapped around her serpentine guitar melodies. The music was tantalizing but it was anxious, sometimes showy. Not a bad thing, but it felt self-conscious, like she had something to prove.
On her third and best album, , she’s matured, found herself, chilled out—whatever you want to call it, it’s made her music more triumphant, less nervous. It’s an album that has the feel of everyday luxury, a collection of songs so assured that they feel like they always existed, and Yanya simply plucked them out of the air to give to you. She’s not without her problems (the thorniness of romance is a lyrical theme), but instead of shredding out her frustrations out with a gnarly riff or a honking saxophone solo, she owns them poetically, giving a torch singer’s graceful performance across the album’s 11 songs.
Yanya’s signature guitar sound is still present, but the itch has been scratched. Some of that newfound ease may be thanks to songwriter Wilma Archer, once an electronic music producer known as who co-wrote with Yanya. This is the first album where Yanya has worked with only one producer, and having a steady collaborator gives the album a cohesion you may not have noticed the previous two didn’t have.
The sound is unhurried and lush, with Yanya’s voice confidently tender. “I’m a loser first/Come on do your worst,” she taunts on album opener “Keep On Dancing,” in a line that might recall a classic retort from ’ Hannah Horvath: “Any mean thing someone’s gonna think of to say about me, I’ve already said to me, about me.” Except (no spoilers) I don’t think Hannah actualized the lesson from that kind of self-critique in the way Yanya has.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In fact, “Keep On Dancing” begins with a moment of vinegar, a gauntlet thrown. “What you looking for?/Shut up and raise your glass if you’re not sure/Still I can smile, it’s fucking miserable/So deep in the crime of being beautiful.
” She says “shut up” in a way that drips with bile, and delivers the rest of the lines unapologetically. Whoever she is talking to deserves it. But this is not a mean or spiteful album.
It’s an album about getting comfortable in the discomfort. On the single “Like I Say (I runaway),” Yanya sings, “The minute I’m not in control/I’m tearing up inside.” It’s a line that would make a therapist simultaneously concerned yet proud of her self-awareness.
In the , Yanya plays a runaway bride, an image perhaps a little too on the nose. But when she loses her veil and escapes, it’s not into someone else’s arms, -style, but into an empty field. She looks around at the trees, the sky.
Nothing offers her an idea of her next move. She didn’t bail because she had a better thing going, she just knew that what was in front of her wasn’t right, and so she did something about it. This bounding into the unknown is expressed throughout the album with light accent pieces, notably Joe Harvey-Whyte’s plaintively played pedal-steel guitar, which shows up on four tracks, and Clíona Ní Choileáin’s august cello performance, which shows up on two.
Neither instrument is over- or underutilized, and neither overwhelms the songs with anything florid. When Choileáin’s instrument enters towards the end of “Mutations,” a song with a bit of an angsty constitution, it just feels like relief. One of my favorite songs on is “Binding,” which may be the record’s quietest.
It’s exemplary of the album’s easy strength; her voice exudes confidence. It’s a -style miracle Yanya’s singing pumps out such force while hardly ever needing to rise above a whisper. Matching her vocal performance, “Binding” boils the instrumentation down to the bare bones, but nothing is lost.
The song is made of not much more than a spare drum line, pedal steel, and folky strum of the guitar, while Yanya sings an impressionistic tale that is either about a car accident, getting high, or the end of a relationship. Maybe all three? She isn’t sure. In a recent , Yanya said of the song, “I can’t be too certain, but all the lyrics leading up to that are about someone being totally out of it, like they’ve drunk too much, or they’re on this long drive and are not really present.
” She says the song’s subject is “trying to escape and get to this blissful nowhereness, of leaving their body behind.” That sounds good, until you realize maybe it doesn’t. It’s nice to regard the soul, but on this journey to nirvana, does our earthly body not deserve some respect? Apparently not.
On “Made Out of Memory,” Yanya, wispy and staccato, directly addresses this corporeal egress with some of the album’s most threatening lyrics, knife to her own throat: “I’ll dig my own grave/I don’t give a fuck.” Another venomous moment. But one done with admirable self-acceptance, however troubled.
The next line: “You know I’m not ashamed to jump in.” You have to believe her..
