Nilüfer Yanya formally announces her new album “My Method Actor”, out September 13th on Ninja Tune. The news arrives alongside the release of her new single, the near-title track “Method Actor,” and follows her recent single “Like I Say (I runaway),” which the New York Times described as, “reveling in contrasting textures” and The FADER called, “a jolting return.” Putting herself in an unnamed character’s shoes, “Method Actor” portrays a mini-life story in under four minutes. The accompanying visualiser was shot in an old hotel in Benidorm, Spain and is a one take video capturing Nilüfer sitting down to share the song’s story.
“It feels like it’s still there — I just don’t know what it is,” Nilüfer Yanya tells me from her home in London, a hand grazing her forehead as her eyes sail to the top left corner of the Zoom window.
We’ve reached an ebb in an otherwise easy, volleying conversation, the subject of faith slipping between whatever words we toss its way.
Questions of faith and destiny have always lived in Yanya’s music, and never more so than on “My Method Actor,” her luxurious paint box of a third full-length album. In her previous work, faith was always misplaced, destiny a bright-red inevitability; a plummet from the skies or rapidly approaching car wreck. On “My Method Actor”, Yanya’s heart rate has slowed alongside her compositions — rather than a pulley dragging her over the cliff’s edge, belief in something more has become a potential guide rope.
“I hadn’t really grown up religious, but there’s been religion in my family. Like, my dad’s Muslim. My mom, she’s not practicing, but she’s Catholic,” Yanya explains. “So I feel like I’ve grown up around religion, but not really being part of anything. And I kind of felt disconnected, in that way of feeling like you don’t belong.”
She continues, “So it kind of makes sense, that maybe I’d crave a kind of… everyone else is doing this, what is it that I can do? And I think maybe it’s just trying to create your own sense of faith or belief in something. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”
“I think a lot about what / I’m destined for / I’m dreaming of the end,” she sings on the shapeshifting “Made Out of Memory,” perhaps the cleanest summation of Yanya’s obsession with the forked path toward oblivion. As the climate catastrophe burns entire cities off the map and bombs wreak genocidal havoc, Yanya’s previously insular writing has cracked open, her firing synapses illuminating places far outside her own head.
“There are horrible things happening, and you have to keep believing and keep trying to challenge those things and make something good happen as a response,” she says.
If writing these songs is what Yanya is destined for — and if I’m destined to be here writing about them — it can be tough to square. How do you continue to create when creation feels so small in the face of material suffering, of apocalyptic enormity?
“It kind of feels more frivolous and less frivolous at the same time,” she says, laughing. “Like, it must mean something! But then it’s like, ‘Oh, of course it doesn’t mean anything,’ don’t be ridiculous.”
While Yanya is responsible for the melodies and lyrics on “My Method Actor”, the music was largely written by Yanya’s longtime creative partner and producer Will Archer. It’s a testament to the pair’s synergy that Yanya building her songs atop Archer’s compositions hasn’t discoloured her singular voice, though she says she sometimes gets hung up on the two’s evolving roles.
‘My Method Actor’, released September 13th, 2024 on Ninja Tune
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