The singer-songwriter’s striking second album excels at a kind of subtle disclosure, relying less on power than it does texture and immaculately sparing detail.
Time can’t heal a wound you choose to leave open. All over PAINLESS, the second album by Nilüfer Yanya, the London songwriter lingers in feelings of heartbreak, dislocation, and rejection, and refuses to let them go. “Don’t like whenever I’m not in pain/Peeling back, not noticing/The blood and bones beneath my skin,” she sings on “midnight sun,” one of several disquieting lyrics about doing herself harm or inviting whoever hurt her to go ahead and grind her heart underfoot while they’re at it. The sting proves that this thing was once alive, even if she has to dig her nails under the scab to still feel it.
Yanya has always written such physical music. Her voice is a tender muscle; her songs have a sinewy twist, and her loud-quiet guitar can flood in as unexpectedly as cheeks flushing at the wrong moment. What’s remarkable about PAINLESS is how she whittles almost everything down—the near-monomaniacal emotional range, the abrupt, broken language, her palette reduced to smoke and ash and nerves—and makes even more of an impact. Partly that’s down to her beautiful melodies, which remain mercifully intact, looping in sync with her circular thoughts and fractal fears. “Troubled don’t count the ways I’m broken/Your troubles won’t count, not once we’ve spoken/What troubles me now if I tear this open/Some people won’t have the faintest notion,” runs the cracked lullaby of “trouble,” each line starting with the flicker of a chest heave.
Yanya could easily have followed her rollicking 2019 debut, Miss Universe, with an even more festival-ready record, but instead, this bold songwriter strands us with her in a state of alienation, where no touch or feeling works like it used to. If there’s an arrow from Miss Universe to PAINLESS, it’s in the former’s “Heat Rises,” a last-nerves gasp set to an insistent drum machine. That bristling electronic spine anchors many of these songs, supplying their desecrated foundations. Its tempos are terse, abrupt and unrelenting, mirroring the inevitability of time, a march Yanya can’t stop no matter how hard she tries. “the dealer” runs on a restless breakbeat that she attacks with loose-wrist, grimy guitar: “Patience there she goes/Cadence set in stone,” she sings in the spacious middle eight, as if standing on a cliff edge and watching it vanish. “L/R” observes a cold figure moving on autopilot over a cold, dubbed-out beat; meanwhile on “shameless,” she yearns to preserve a sad scene, questioning why someone’s touch is worth the humiliation it causes. The Sade-like beauty in her voice and the sweltering intimacy of the song’s fizzing beat tell you why.
PAINLESS excels at that kind of subtle disclosure, relying less on power than it does texture and immaculately sparing detail. When many of these songs appear to revolve around not knowing where you stand with someone, it’s a feat to give each one a distinct set of emotional stakes. The guitar playing speaks to Yanya’s emotional purgatory—right down to the knowing echoes of Radiohead’s anxious, spiraling arpeggios on “stabilise” and “midnight sun”; to the vaulting contradictions (the love-you-hate-you “belong with you” is intermittently as euphoric as Grandaddy’s “A.M. 180”), and the slumps of defeat daubed in classic, moody alt-rock blues on “chase me.” And she wields the immense expressive reserves of her voice with delicacy, as if diluting pigment to watercolor, writing with incredible economy. “Spit me out here/In the sunlight … Watch me burn/Night and day,” she gasps on “shameless,” while “stabilise” shapes a dismal inner-city scene in muttered vignettes. In the rare moments she reaches for poetry, it’s earned: She can’t tell whether the inevitable conclusion of “chase me” is coming, scarring, or already gone; whichever it is, “it heals like a cold setting sun,” a profound image of bloodless love. “try” finds her questioning what had seemed certain: “Silent leaves/I walked/In your forest/But there’s no roots/I am not sure I got this.”
Inevitably, time runs its course and heals the wounds for her. The end of PAINLESS blossoms into playful, springlike tones: “the mystic,” all melty and lilting, flirtatiously negotiates “red lines,” and “anotherlife” dips into the mellow ’90s groove that Lorde looked to on Solar Power, borrowing its ersatz chill to convince the departing party that she’ll be fine. Yanya’s voice, at its lowest range here, is bittersweet and conciliatory: You can’t quite tell whether she means it. But all of a sudden, you feel the warmth of the sun on her skin again.
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