Nilüfer Yanya Is Ready To Become Miss Universe

Once Nilüfer Yanya sings, her face stays steely. She holds a constellation of emotion in her brow as she delivers the big questions like, "Do you like pain?" Her hands, meanwhile, rhythmically widen and stretch, evolving into chord shapes that keep her songs grounded, although aspirational. It's how every one of the young London-based singer-songwriter’s tunes starts, with six strings and an idea.


Yanya, who began off on piano as a child although picked up the guitar at 12, has spent the past few years winning over fans with her sonic palette of alt-rock with jazzy corners. Her debut album, Miss Universe, out Friday (March 22), goes even deeper: the guitar lines slice harder, the percussion bulks up, and Yanya's smoky voice fortifies the entire operation. Oh, there's also the health-service hotline interludes that give the album a whisper of dystopia. Miss Universe contains multitudes.


Yet the star at its center remains fully unostentatious. "I'm not an organic — what's the word — performer," Yanya told MTV News. Right after positive experiences with a music instructor in school, she applied to study pop music in college, though she mentioned she didn't really aspire to go. As soon as she didn't get in, that was fine; she kept working on her own. "The first time I played I had such a big buzz off the playing that lasted a day, so it's certainly addictive. Your songs are different as soon as you're playing them live. However it's certainly not easy to do, for me anyway."


You wouldn't know it. At a recent show on a little basement stage at New York City's Berlin, she breezed through selections from Miss Universe with help from her musical group, including creative collaborator/saxophonist Jazzi Bobbi, fully owning the room. She channeled her early guitar inspirations The Strokes and The Libertines on the rollicking "In Your Head," a wonderful entry point into her colorful catalogue. In the song’s video, Yanya oozes star power; one particularly IG-ready moment finds her posing with a Arby's soft drink in a pink dress, bejeweled and fierce — it's unsurprisingly become a go-to image for outlets covering her music. Her actual Instagram page is full of such defining moments. She can tell you who she is with an eas look. Or an indelible hook.


Nothing is quite like "In Your Head," a lyrical doubt spiral that sounds like the most enjoyable night out you've ever had. It started with a demo based around a muddy guitar part plus a drum machine and with help from producer John Congleton (who’s worked with each person from Earl Sweatshirt to St. Vincent to Marilyn Manson), ended up "bigger and better." "It was sort of refreshing have the ability to work like that, I think, because a lot of the time, from your demo to a finished song, you do a lot of refining. Nevertheless here it looked like, let’s just do it again nevertheless make it sound better," Yanya said.


The song plays off the album's overarching specter, a futuristic health hotline called We Worry About Your Health (WWAY Health) — "a sort of slogan" she noticed stuck in her mind — that manifests in five interludes dryly narrated by Yanya herself. "We are here for you. We care for you. We worry about you, and you also don't have to," she intones to open the album. A minute later, on "In Your Head," she's questioning everything: "I can think what I want, I can feel what I feel / Up until you mention it out loud, how will I know if it's real?" It's entirely possible to experience Miss Universe solely through its wiggly grooves and midnight-purple guitar tones while not paying much attention to its higher conceptual aims. Nevertheless in the event listen, you could begin pondering the unknowingly vast cosmos of your own brain.


"How much control do you hope to give away?" Yanya mentioned. "For everything you get, you give something away. And I think my conclusion is that your mind is the last safe space, really, and in case you can't look soon after your mind and you also can't keep it safe, in the event if you must open it up to everything, then you have no control. It's sort of a scary thought, really."


One place it's nearly impossible to have total control, obviously, is the world wide web. Nevertheless it's also capable of intense community-building, especially as it applies to musicians. Yanya's already amassed some loyal fans who record themselves playing her songs on guitar and post the videos online. One particularly handy one offers a tutorial for her eerie and mournful "Keep On Calling," a godsend for fans of artists whose work perhaps hasn't made it onto guitar-tab sites however. Yanya mentioned a friend showed her one such cover. "I was like, wow this is so weird. Although they were playing it sort of wrong," she mentioned with a hearty laugh. "It made me feel a little better about myself, I don't know why."


One of the final sounds Yanya permits us to hear on Miss Universe comes as closer "Heavyweight Champion of the Year" winds itself up to a hypnotic, cathartic conclusion. Over a blast of squelching guitar noise, she lets out one of the most human whines noticed anywhere on the album: "Game over, I'm / Heartbroken / I gave you up." It's a powerful song even upon first listen. Although in closing, it sheds new light on the whole preceding enterprise. All of the spooky WWAY Health outsourcing and funky explorations of self become segment of a larger ecosystem inside the album's framework. "Music is weird," she mentioned. "Like, whichever you're sort of thinking, you write into a song, and then in case you sing the song, it's sort of like you're making things happen by singing that song out loud and putting that message out there."