NILÜFER YANYA
8/10
Londoner’s self-exploratory third. By Jason Anderson
My Method Actor
NINJA TUNE
New terrain: Nilüfer Yanya
MOLLY
THERE have yet to be reports of Nilüfer Yanya refusing to answer to her own name, terrifying production assistants, or exhibiting any of the demanding off-camera behaviour once expected of Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis and other master thespians. Nevertheless, the notion of the method actor is a potent one for the London singer-songwriter. She’s spoken of the kinship she feels with these counterparts’ determination to ground performances in personal experiences and memories of trauma, essentially reliving those emotions in order to lend authenticity and urgency to present-day expressions. She sees her songs as a potential means to do the same.
Another anxiety well-known to actors –or, indeed, to anyone who spends too much time on social media –surfaces throughout her third album as she captures and ponders instances of slippage between the versions of herself that are public and private, and of transitions between earlier, younger selves and who she is in the now. She often expresses a measure of uncertainty about what constitutes “my new costume” as she calls it in “Method Actor”, along with the worry expressed in “Binding” that “I’m hardly here”. Such lyrics lend additional resonance to My Method Actor’s cover image of Yanya perched on a bathroom counter, straining to get a look at herself in the mirror over her shoulder, as if looking for some reassurance that she’s present and accounted for.