Nilüfer Yanya – My Method Actor

★★★★

Released September 13th, 2024 on Ninja Tune Records

English singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya is no stranger to big gestures. When the grunge-era guitar kicks in on “Like I Say (I runaway)” they take up all the oxygen in the room for a brief moment, a return to days when the radio ran on such moments. Anyone who’s followed Yanya since Miss Universe, in those long-gone pre-pandemic days, knows that big festival moments are something she is very, very good at. However, as 2022’s Painless showed, she is also exceedingly good at intimate, small moments. My Method Actor doesn’t break new ground beyond these two stances. Instead, it amalgamates the two, marrying big rock songwriting with folkie moments. What sets Yanya apart from her contemporaries is the edge she brings to both of these styles. It’s hard-hitting indie rock a la Miss Universe but now with an abundance of lush textures, a sonic jungle of an album.

It’s an expansion, and a consolidation, simultaneously, but the circumstances of the recording could not have been more constrained. Yanya hunkered down in three places across the UK with Wilma Archer (Yanya’s creative partner, who has also produced Sudan Archives and Jessie Ware) and that was it, in terms of recording the album. Just the two of them, and from that springs the complicated, flowing musical journey of My Method Actor. Before the album’s release, Yanya stated that she’d gotten inspiration from exploring the concept of method acting, in particular the technique of using one life-altering memory as a vein to mine from. “The reason why some people find method acting traumatic and maybe not safe mentally,” she told Consequence of Sound, “is because you’re always going back to that moment… It’s a bit like being a musician. When you’re performing, you’re still trying to invoke the energy and emotion of when you first wrote it, in that moment.”

The energy she keeps going back to works, regardless of anything else. My Method Actor is the sound of a generational talent confirming that the ground under her feet is solid, and testing her reach into the air for all she’s worth.