On My Method Actor, Nilüfer Yanya is done acting

In a landscape fraught with metaironic drag personas and vintage bombshell homages, it’s clear that there’s an ever-increasing demand for musicians to brand themselves as a characters. It’s not enough for artists, especially female ones, to let their music speak for itself. Not without a carefully curated stage presence and schtick to accompany it (an act, if you will).

Against this backdrop, British singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya’s third studio album, My Method Actor, is something of a revelation. The record is Yanya at her most confessional, a result of her pushback against the industry’s clamor for both spectacle and so-called authenticity. In an interview with Tone Glow, Yanya comments that “everyone’s using (the) performance (of personality) to work out who they are.” It’s precisely this process of “method acting,” of finding the pockets where Nilüfer Yanya the artist and Nilüfer Yanya the person can reconcile, where the project threads together.

Take the opening track, “Keep on Dancing,” an unyielding flurry of bitter questions and accusations. “What you looking for?” she asks, waiting for someone, anyone, to validate her performance: “Just like a child, I play for your applause / Until you smile I’m fucking miserable.” Agitated strums, a frantic drum kit and menacing strings propel “Like I Say (I runaway)” from paranoia to cathartic release. By titular track “Method Actor,” these instrumentals escalate into punches of distorted guitar, reaching the summit of the record’s aggression and emotional volatility. 

Preambled by these three, the album introduces itself in turbulent form, but where My Method Actor really shines is in its moments of quietude — on the tracks that simmer and reveal their genius slowly, upon repeated listens. Songs like “Faith’s Late” or “Mutations,” commanded by Yanya’s dreamy, almost pop hooks and sharp staccato snares, are brought to a meandering pace as string arrangements from the album’s sole co-producer, Wilma Archer, weave in and out of the tracks’ infectious momentum. These moments of orchestration — a far cry from the frenetic percussion and acerbic melodies of her previous record, 2022’s Painless — color My Method Actor’s sparse arrangements with a much warmer temperament. 

Yanya’s lyricism on these tracks, too, often blossoms in surprising ways around the instrumentation. “Ready for Sun (touch)” finds her coming to terms with her tumult, relinquishing that, “I think I really wanted to miss you / I think I really wanted the chance / But never really want it to last.” The song mirrors the reluctance of her acceptance, burgeoning into a sweeping outro of discordant violin screeches. Yanya describes her collaboration with Archer as an exercise in practicing trust, and My Method Actor stands as a testament to their close partnership. The new sonic territory Archer offers wraps itself around Yanya’s sharp songwriting organically, rarely feeling calculated or cobbled together. Like on “Binding,” the record’s most subdued track, a lilting guitar loop and periodic ticking-clock crescendo repeat over and over, emphasizing Yanya’s pleas for a release: “We chase each storm, it takes me nowhere / Cut this loop inside my heart.”

On the album’s back half, the pacing occasionally does a disservice to its own sonic scheme, subjecting compelling ideas to a stubborn commitment to the formula (tight drums plus plucky guitar plus pensive melodies). “Call It Love” is a prime example, languishing in syrupy repetitions of the same internal rhymes, a trick that worked to great effect on earlier track “Binding,” but feels reheated on second usage. 

By contrast, penultimate track and album highlight “Just a Western,” fashions the folksy ingredients from across the record into a full-blown Americana installation, complete with tambourine rattles and Spanish guitar flourishes. Despite its nearly cinematic rendering of the sounds of a spaghetti Western, Yanya’s story is one of finally setting her boundaries, not riding off into the sunset with her paramour. She takes a firm stance, declaring, “I won’t call in a favor, won’t do it for free anymore,” punctuating it with “Shut up, won’t you listen, won’t you?” Transformed are the spiraling worries of “Keep on Dancing” into judicious insights about moving on. She’s done waiting for others to change, and in a striking break from her economic writing, the song descends into unshackled “la la las,” a triumphant fadeout to her journey of self-discovery. 

With closing track “Wingspan,” Yanya capstones My Method Actor by showing how far she’s come.

“You don’t get to be devoted,” she whispers. “Now you’re dead to me.”

Her anger is filtered out across the album’s runtime, distilled down into a newfound sense of peace. The image of her wingspan — arms spread out wide — is a powerful one, as if the scattered pieces of herself are finally harmonized in a wholly embodied way. The Nilüfer Yanya that sends the album off with the line “here comes destiny” isn’t the same one that ushered it in, but a version that’s found joy in searching for herself. And as listeners, we can only hope she continues to do so. It makes for a deeply rewarding listen.

Daily Arts Contributor Matthew Popp can be reached at poppmatt@umich.edu.

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