"It feels like it's still there — I just don't know what it is," Nilüfer Yanya tells me from her home in London, a hand grazing her forehead as her eyes sail to the top left corner of the Zoom window.
We've reached an ebb in an otherwise easy, volleying conversation, the subject of faith slipping between whatever words we toss its way.
Questions of faith and destiny have always lived in Yanya's music, and never more so than on My Method Actor, her luxurious paintbox of a third full-length. In her previous work, faith was always misplaced, destiny a bright-red inevitability; a plummet from the skies or rapidly approaching car wreck. On My Method Actor, Yanya's heart rate has slowed alongside her compositions — rather than a pulley dragging her over the cliff's edge, belief in something more has become a potential guide rope.
"I hadn't really grown up religious, but there's been religion in my family. Like, my dad's Muslim. My mom, she's not practicing, but she's Catholic," Yanya explains. "So I feel like I've grown up around religion, but not really being part of anything. And I kind of felt disconnected, in that way of feeling like you don't belong."
She continues, "So it kind of makes sense, that maybe I'd crave a kind of… everyone else is doing this, what is it that I can do? And I think maybe it's just trying to create your own sense of faith or belief in something. I don't know. I don't know if it's a good idea."
Good idea or not, this tricky dance with the other side colours a great deal of My Method Actor — "Do you feel dumb? / Applying all that sand and dust to science?" Yanya sings on "Faith's Late," a loping interrogation of her complex relationship with identity and belief.
"There's still lots of religion and spirituality, but I feel like, especially growing up in London, that's not part of most people's everyday lives. It almost feels like a general cultural rejection of those things," Yanya says. "Now I'm thinking, 'Oh, what if some of that stuff is true? The stuff I just didn't really believe in or haven't believed in. Maybe there's a reason why we're here, or maybe there is something else, or maybe…"
"I think a lot about what / I'm destined for / I'm dreaming of the end," she sings on the shapeshifting "Made Out of Memory," perhaps the cleanest summation of Yanya's obsession with the forked path toward oblivion. As the climate catastrophe burns entire cities off the map and bombs wreak genocidal havoc, Yanya's previously insular writing has cracked open, her firing synapses illuminating places far outside her own head.
"There are horrible things happening, and you have to keep believing and keep trying to challenge those things and make something good happen as a response," she says.
If writing these songs is what Yanya is destined for — and if I'm destined to be here writing about them — it can be tough to square. How do you continue to create when creation feels so small in the face of material suffering, of apocalyptic enormity?
"It kind of feels more frivolous and less frivolous at the same time," she says, laughing. "Like, it must mean something! But then it's like, 'Oh, of course it doesn't mean anything,' don't be ridiculous."
So much of My Method Actor is powered by that tug of war — self-laceration and doubt is pitted against a sense of duty, a calling toward something. Yanya herself can't say what exactly that call is, but with each song, she seems to be getting closer.
"I was kind of trying to pin down a sense of wanting and desire. I feel like I really want something, and I don't really know what it is," she says slowly. "But it's there, a kind of fire, a kind of burning, and sometimes it's a fuel, and sometimes it's just like, 'Wow, look at it.'
"It's kind of a push and pull between longing and desire for something, and fear. Also, is it good to let your desire push you? Or should it be more clear and clean and cooler to touch?" she says, genuinely asking. "Most people can't believe in apathy, 'cause then we wouldn't be bothering. People wouldn't try, and people do try — they keep living, keep going."
On sparse, alien closer "Wingspan," — a sister song to PAINLESS closer "Anotherlife," ending the album on a delicate question mark — what sounds like a bruising kiss-off could easily speak to Yanya's sometimes fraught relationship with her glowering muse. "I'm unnaturally ascended when it's hosting me," she sings, synths and ghostly echoes melting around her; the high of creation is being dismantled in real time, that untouchable fire blowing away across the dark.
As assured and composed as My Method Actor sounds — its distortion-caked, rattling singles are largely red herrings, and Yanya spends the vast majority of the album in a patient trance — there's a kernel of complicated insecurity at its core.
While Yanya is responsible for the melodies and lyrics on My Method Actor, the music was largely written by Yanya's longtime creative partner and producer Will Archer. It's a testament to the pair's synergy that Yanya building her songs atop Archer's compositions hasn't discoloured her singular voice, though she says she sometimes gets hung up on the two's evolving roles.
"I still feel kind of weird about that, if I'm being honest. But we kind of have this formula of working, and it's really working right now," she says. "I wouldn't want to change that just because of my ego."
She continues, "I think it's probably because I started doing music by myself when I was younger. So I think I felt like I always had something to prove. I just felt like I had lots of ideas and I really loved making music that way; I didn't really want to be a collaborator. I just wanted to do it myself, because that's what made me happy."
As Yanya tells it, that happiness has been complicated by shadows as she's grown older: "It still feels very tied to my general feelings of self worth, writing. If I'm able to write, it's good. If I'm not, it's bad." Perhaps her search for faith, her belief in some personal destiny, is an attempt to tap back into the ease of youth.
"I feel like the general purpose is still there, but it's definitely shifting. I think now, especially, it's something not only I expect myself to do, but other people expect me to do," she says. "That wasn't really there before. It's become more anchored and a definitive part of me. Every word has a weight."