THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “As a whole, Nilüfer Yanya’s third album My Method Actor asks questions with no easy answers. It is a supple, expansive body of work that peers into the crevices of life, exploring them with comforting strings, skittering beats, soul-tinged melodies and swooning harmonies. It asks, who are we? Why do we follow the paths we follow? What is at the heart of it all?
While writing My Method Actor, Yanya retreated into the studio with her creative partner Wilma Archer (Sudan Archives, MF Doom). She had toured her second album Painless for a year and entered a period of transition — between albums, between record companies, between homes. My Method Actor deals a lot with the idea of movement from one part of life and into another. The seeds of My Method Actor were planted in early 2023, but it wasn’t until the spring of that year that shoots began to appear. As songs started to form, Yanya and Archer squirreled themselves away from the world.
“This is the most intense album, in that respect,” Yanya says. “Because it’s only been us two. We didn’t let anyone else into the bubble.” They wrote and recorded in small sessions, spread across London, Wales and Eastbourne. You can feel this cocooning of creative energy in the atmosphere of the record: it envelopes you entirely in cinematic sweeps while feeling intimate, finally inviting you into the little world they created and offering up its secrets.
Songs bloomed into being in unexpected ways helping Yanya make sense of her world and the ways it’s changing as she enters her late 20s and grapples with what it means to be an established musician. “For me, writing is definitely problem solving — in the way they say that dreaming is like problem solving. You’re like, oh, that sounds good. That looks good. That makes sense. But you don’t really know why. You’re kind of using that part of your creative brain that doesn’t have to make sense.” Her lyrics are specific and hazy at once, and sometimes surreal: She talks about the songs as though she’s trying to decipher the person she was when she wrote them.
The near-title track Method Actor finds her putting herself in an unnamed character’s shoes to portray a mini-life story in under four minutes. “I was researching method acting — and from what I read, it’s based on finding this one memory in your life, a life-altering, life-changing memory,” Yanya says. “The reason why some people find method acting traumatic and maybe not safe mentally, is because you’re always going back to that moment. It can be good or bad but you’re always feeding off the energy, something that’s defined you — and that’s what helps you become the character. It’s a bit like being a musician. When you’re performing, you’re still trying to invoke the energy and emotion of when you first wrote it, in that moment. It definitely feels like you’re having to recreate or step into that headspace.”
