Nilüfer Yanya, much like her music, is conflicted. “It does feel like everything is pointless some of the time,” she says laughing almost heartily, clearly at ease with some genteel nihilism. But as one of life’s questioners—and a potent songwriter— such existentialism is commonplace. In fact, it’s a proclivity that caveats her creative output, shown perhaps most starkly on her newly-released third studio record, My Method Actor. “You should pull that trigger, aim it at my liver // Losin’ a pulse and all my problems” she sings teasingly on the album’s title track, her sardonic wit oozing from a sonic palette that never deviates from its mission; a vessel for Yanya’s broody, intoxicating tone.

Yanya isn’t self-deprecative, but she’s a step below modest. “Nooo!” she exclaims when I insinuate she has obtained a ‘cult’ status—in the right circles. It’s an excited negation of unbridled disbelief, the type you’d hear from someone who has won an all-inclusive trip to Zante on an afternoon game show. But, from my own perspective at least, the notion that the 29 year-old’s reputation evokes such an epithet is warranted. The space that she exists within feels strange; unfounded amongst her would-be cohort of guitar-driven British singer-songwriters—so much so that she’s rarely involved in the same conversations. And, despite being born-and-bred in London, she’s not confined to Metropolitianisms, or British sonic etymology for that matter; her music feels greater than such vacuous identification. She has always found listenership in the States in fact, an envious achievement for many of her UK contemporaries. Her first label was an American imprint, ATO, and she’s been on a smattering of sprawling tours across the pond—the latest of which is set to kick off towards September’s twilight. Avoiding ever-so-outdated cultural descriptors is unsurprising though—Yanya’s music is bigger than a singular pretence. Rather, its purpose lies in the way it provokes its listener into a deeper sense of being, and in the way the writer feels in its making.

We’re sitting at a canal front café near Mile End Park, sharing a late summer’s morning. Yanya spots a rat scurrying into a dark crack in the wall on the other side of the water, pointing it out with a playful “ew!” She answers my enquiries with blithely candour, and is full of questions for me; “I like to know who I’m talking to,” she reasons to my breezy objections at such a role reversal. There’s an inherent authenticity to her manner—another characteristic her music shares—that traces back to her upbringing. Spending the majority of her life in West London, her “parents are both artists. They do a bit of everything, mainly fine art, and a lot of printmaking and painting. I really wanted to be an artist as well. When I was young I spent a lot of time drawing and painting, and I thought about whether to go to art school or do music. I was doing piano until I was like 18 and doing grades and stuff like that. So I could have done the more normal musical route. But I wasn’t really into… studying music I think,” she chortles. “It was such a headache. It’s great to learn stuff, but I found it really stressful.”

Classically trained on the piano (as well as a brief stint with the cello), in her tweens Yanya “started learning guitar solely with the intention of writing songs.” Supported by a family that encouraged creative expression but didn’t have musical faculty themselves, it “was always my own thing. I kind of hid it from everybody for a while.” That is, until she realised that she “wanted to do it as a [career], so showing your music is obviously a vital step. So I just made myself get over the hurdle. It was exciting, sending demos and playing open mics and gigging. You never knew what was going to happen.” After finishing school, Yanya undertook an artist development course, and went on to release a trio of EP’s that boasted impressive sonic and thematic depth, gaining enough notoriety to be plucked from the masses by New York-based independent label ATO, who signed her on for one album with the option of a second.

“My first album felt confusing but fun,” Yanya recalls on her 2019 debut LP, Miss Universe. “I was really excited to be making an album, but I didn’t really have a plan. It was a patchwork quilt that I pulled together at the end through the idea of what I wanted it to be about. It felt like a really messy approach.” The album is an ambitious inaugural attempt at a full-length, and arguably her most conceptual work to this day—fuelled by skittish interludes revolving around an imaginary wellness hotline she calls WWAY Health. Daring and bohemian, Miss Universe established Yanya amongst the most exhilarating embryonic songwriters in the alt rock landscape. She returned with her sophomore full-length—by way of a terrific stop-gap EP, “Inside Out” in 2021—PAINLESS in early 2022, again released via ATO. “[My] second album, I think I narrowed [her style] down more,” she says. “But it was COVID and kind of a weird time to make music.” Despite any complication, it’s another truly impressive work. Experimental, emotionally devouring and at times sullen, you can feel Yanya’s anxiety dripping from each sonic orifice and deep vocal musing across the fearless and imperfect album, a step back from stadium-sized hooks and towards engulfing texture and puzzle-completing self-realisation.

Gifting ATO two critically-adorned records, Yanya toured PAINLESS and proceeded to bow out from the label, taking time to reflect and evaluate before entering the next zenith. “I think if I made different decisions, I’d be in a weirder space,” she reflects. “The thing about the industry is there’s no right or wrong choice, no correct path. Everything that can be presented to you is an opportunity.” And so she signed for Ninja Tune, the decorated label with its marvellously muddy footprints smeared across British electronic music’s lineage. Given the imprint’s stylistic modus operandi, Yanya’s signing is somewhat of an anomaly, something that she was and is well aware of, but wholly trusts in the label’s intention and heritage. “The way they sold it to me was that they said they were branching out. But they had been following my music for quite a while, so I did feel like it was genuine, it wasn’t just like, ‘we wanna try new things.’”

Bolstered by a new label and “starting to” find the core of her musical identity, Yanya wrote, recorded and released her third—and comprehensively most confident—album, My Method Actor, earlier this month on 13th September. Created between Wales, Eastbourne and Tottenham, the record was made in coalescence with Will Archer, a producer, instrumentalist and long-term collaborator of Yanya’s who came on board for the entirety of the process for the first time. “It just simplified everything,” she reveals on the close-knit dual methodology. “Because we were writing together so much, I let my guard down. We had to really trust each other. But because we know each other, there’s a base layer already there, and [writing the album] just allowed us to go deeper. We only had to listen to each other’s opinions so we had to agree with each other, which can be hard because if one of you doesn’t like it, you kind of have to chuck it away. There’s lots of things that we didn’t finish, and it was an interesting process of elimination as we were going along. We had a streamlined approach to the whole thing.”

My Method Actor is the most fully realised Yanya has felt in her music. Trusting in her own intuitions, devoid of outer influences with her and Archer alone concocting the work, it’s a dazzlingly focused opus, a sojourn of piercing cuts that segue into each other confidently and carefully. It’s often stripped-back, lending more room than ever to her flawless vocal range and capacity, with the production providing measured and meditative ground for Yanya to build upon. Her lyricism—as it always has done—refuses to overcomplicate its ideas, instead leaning into laconic and vivid clauses that play out as visceral reactions and off-kilter cogitates. “There’s a lot of questions like: ‘why am I—why are we—doing any of this? Who am I?’ Classic ones, you know,” she shrugs. “I’m just learning that music and writing songs is my way of working out who I am. Which is why with this album, instead of giving it a name that didn’t have anything to do with that, I liked the idea of calling it My Method Actor, because it was linked to this whole theme of identity and character, and my relationship with music.”

Now set to take the mercurial album on tour—first across the Atlantic, before a run of European and UK dates—the self-defined introvert must once again confront an aspect of her job she feels complexly about. “I’ve learnt to… accept it,” she says slowly, discussing playing live. “That was a part of this album as well, being like—ok this is my life, I can’t live in fear of it and dread it all the time. I think it’s natural to be anxious about being on stage. I enjoy getting a good show together and feeling like I’m not going to mess up, and getting songs to a place where they sound as good as possible. I like showing all of those things to people, but I don’t know if I love performing. But I do love being like, ‘this is my band.’”

Following the tour? A well deserved break. “I’d really like to spend some time just being creative again and just making it because I want to make it, not necessarily thinking about writing an album. If I did this again really soon, I’d just feel a bit dead inside.” You can’t rush excellence, after all. Nilüfer Yanya will go on questioning, she’ll go on struggling, and—undoubtedly, sooner or later—she’ll go on making seminal, self-defining music. “I think I just need to enjoy it for what it is,” she ruminates in finality. “It’s confusing isn’t it? Because people say it’s about being happy all the time. But is that the point? I don’t know. I’m getting to contribute to what is reality. I get to take part, and that’s the point, I think. Everyone should get to take part.”