“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, My Method Actor 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?
While writing My Method Actor, Nilüfer retreated into the studio with her creative partner, Wilma Archer (Sudan Archives/MF Doom/Celeste). She had toured her second album, PAINLESS, for a year and entered a period of transition, between albums, between record companies, between homes. My Method Actor deals a lot with the idea of movement from one part of life and into another. The seeds of My Method Actor 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 squirreled 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. 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.
Songs bloomed into being in unexpected ways helping Yanya make sense of her world and the ways it’s changing as she enters her late twenties and grapples with what it means to be an established musician. “For me, writing is definitely problem solving – in the way they say that dreaming is like problem solving. You’re like, oh, that sounds good. That looks good. That makes sense. But you don’t really know why. You’re kind of using that part of your creative brain that doesn’t have to make sense.” Her lyrics are specific and hazy at once, and sometimes surreal: she talks about the songs as though she’s trying to decipher the person she was when she wrote them.
Nilüfer Yanya doesn’t claim to have the answers yet but she knows what the questions are. The
realisation that time is precious, that paths can be changed and that creativity is not necessarily a
constant state even when your whole life is built around it have given her a new level of freedom.
Listening to My Method Actor is a warm, cinematic reminder that we all contain multitudes. Your
precious time could not be better spent.
Release: September 13th, 2024, Ninja Tune