In 2014, Nilüfer Yanya, then 18, uploaded a couple of tracks to SoundCloud. The generic tags attached to Waves and Cheap Flights suggested they were #indie and #alternative, but there seemed to be a number of directions the embryonic artist behind them might conceivably take, some more interesting than others. The echoing guitar accompaniment bore the influence of the xx; equally, she displayed an easy way with melody that suggested mainstream pop. Meanwhile, a canny record label with an eye on the money to be made in the middle of the road might have noted the honeyed, sultry vocals and pushed her in the direction of Radio 2-friendly retro-soul.
The tracks were followed by a succession of singles that suggested something more individual was happening. If you were searching for a comparison that fitted 2016’s Baby Luv and Small Crimes, you could have done worse than 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, the debut album by King Krule, with whom she shared a penchant for undistorted, electric guitar-based minimalism and a voice that flitted between a soulful croon and something more slurred and strange, more obviously a product of 21st-century London. Even so, you probably couldn’t have predicted where Yanya has ended up, five years later. Her debut album is a loosely conceptual work, centring on a satire of those organisations that crop up unbidden on social media and promise you a holistic programme of constant care and coaching support that will enable you to kick the booze, drop a dress size, sculpt your abs or otherwise improve your life beyond your wildest imaginings.
It feels a little like the Who’s 1967 album The Who Sell Out, updated for an age in which commercial pirate radio has been usurped by streaming services, but the advertising bombardment remains the same – at least if you decline to pay a subscription fee. An age in which the vendors of spot cream, deodorant and bodybuilding courses have been displaced by companies flogging a spurious notion of “wellness”. In between the mock adverts, Miss Universe throws up a ragged miscellany of styles – rackety alt-rock, radio-ready pop, saxophones that appear to have escaped from a Sade album, jagged left-field guitars, primitive drum machines and what sounds like an attempt to make the kind of 80s AOR ballad that’s popular with Magic Radio on a lo-fi, bedroom-bound budget – all blessed by the melodic facility already in evidence when Yanya made her debut. The sense of an artist who could have taken any number of paths, but decided to amble off road instead, is hard to miss.
As with the skits on hip-hop albums, you do wonder how often you’ll want to revisit the interstitial tracks once you have got her point about how all this plays on, and increases, anxiety. Indeed, you don’t really need them to grasp it. No matter how big the choruses get, the music carries a sense of disquiet: you’re never far from, as one track puts it, Monsters Under the Bed. If Heavyweight Champion of the World sounds like a hit single, it’s a troubled one. Even before you get to the lyric, “I’m tired from all these dreams, lack of sleep, I’m still wired”, you notice the way the staccato vocal pulls fretfully at the melody and the nervy urgency with which Yanya hits the strings of her guitar.
Similarly, while you can easily imagine In Your Head becoming an indie disco staple, its depiction of a relationship collapsing is filled with apprehension and vain attempts at second-guessing. The drums boom, the guitar riffs are punchy and appealing, but there’s something wrong with the sound: it lurches when it should flow, feeling as if it’s about to fall to pieces. So does Melt, which comes decorated with the aforementioned smooth 80s saxophones. Its initial calm, small-hours atmosphere gradually unravels and the lyrics reveal themselves to be about the point in an evening where hedonistic indulgence slips into worryingly nihilistic abandon. The result sounds not unlike Arthur Russell’s attempts to make pop music, so wildly off-kilter they went unreleased until years after his death.
It all feels very frayed and personal, as do the intriguing musical juxtapositions. When a guitar that seems to have escaped from an early 2000s R&B track constructed along the lines of Destiny’s Child’s Jumpin’ Jumpin’ unexpectedly appears in the middle of Paralysed, or Heat Rises manages to simultaneously recall the Strokes’ Hard to Explain and Kelis’s collaboration with Andre 3000, Millionaire, it never feels like an artist being clever for the sake of it. It’s more like listening to someone let the music that seeped into them in their teens gush out, albeit in a profoundly altered state. Altered enough, in fact, that it occasionally leaves you scratching your head. You listen to the rhythm track of Paradise – made up of clicks and yelps, augmented by the scrape of Yanya’s fingers down her guitar strings and wonder how she arrived at it. The answer suggested by the rest of her debut album is that she’s a true original.
What Alexis listened to this week
Helado Negro: Please Won’t Please
Blissful synth-folk: vocals with a hint of Devendra Banhart about them, and lyrics that quietly, thoughtfully, wrestle with issues of race and identity.
• Miss Universe is released on 22 March and can be streamed on NPR now
