On her new album “Painless,” the singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya makes art of her worst habits.
The twenty-six-year-old singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya tends to make music that indulges her worst impulses. Yanya has a singular voice—a disarming rasp that turns every note into a smoldering ember—and her restless pop-rock songs circle her feelings of emptiness and inadequacy. “I’ve hit bottom rock / Swear I’m telling the truth / But, down here I’m dark and confused / Although I cannot tell if I’m paranoid / Or it’s all in my head,” Yanya wails, on “In Your Head,” from 2019.
Around 2015, a breakout moment presented itself. Yanya, then twenty years old, was scouted to be in a girl group put together by’s Louis Tomlinson after a music executive heard some of her early songs on SoundCloud. Fearing her music might become a mere line item in a major-label ledger, she declined the offer; Tomlinson reportedly abandoned the project soon after.
Yanya wrote herself a note to “do less things” while working on her second album, “Painless.” The resulting record, released this month, is pared down but intense, less sprightly yet more rhythmic than her previous work. The songs distinguish themselves with their weighted melodic charms, their textural richness, and the stark interplay between Yanya’s voice and her guitar. The record is moody but propulsive, animated by the perpetual pull of noxious romance.