Music Review: Nilüfer Yanya returns with the vibrant, spare and breathtaking ‘My Method Actor’

The great news is that Nilüfer Yanya’s third album is about to drop. But that means a little homework on your part: Carving out the time to listen. Not just half-listen.
Her 11-track “My Method Actor” is not the kind of music you blast from cars or bars or even put on while cooking. Yanya’s brand of spare, jewelbox-like songs demand your attention, each note and instrument used so deliberately.
The London-based singer-songwriter is like no one else out there, offering songs that appear at first like pleasing soft sketches until they reveal their depth and power, like tissue paper made of palladium.
“My Method Actor” sees Yanya reunite with Will Archer, who co-produces and adds lyrics as well as guitar, drums, piano, backing vocals and synthesizer. In the publishing splits, he sometimes earns the majority of the percentage, making this in many ways as much his album as hers.
The standout tracks — “Call It Love,” “Made Out of Memory” and “Just a Western” — are just three that show off Yanya’s allegorical lyrics on a bed of shifting, bright then shadowy riptides of rhythms and melodies that can include gorgeous smears of pedal steel guitar or cello. Her vision is sharper and even less cluttered than before.
There is always the air of unpredictability, with Yanya whipping out her falsetto or a wall of fuzzy guitars coming from nowhere. On “Mutations,” strings briefly pop up and it’s as pleasing as a glass of water in the desert.
Her lyrics explore the push-pull of love and sometimes the space between lovers, the pulling away. “Can you tell I’m torn now, baby?/Tell me it’s alright/When I’m falling out of view,” she sings on “Like I Say (I runaway).” More ominously, on the title track, she reveals coiled emotions: “Spit my teeth out as you’re bleeding/I gave you everything you needed.”
This is music that is part of the world and yet not of it. So a suggestion: Grab a pair of noise-canceling headphones, hit “play” and really focus on a remarkable collection of songs.
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