m yeule is the Singapore-born, Los Angeles-based nonbinary musician, performance artist, and painter also known as Nat Ćmiel. First self-releasing songs at age 14, they have since emerged as a cult art icon, whose experimental pop songs of emotional excavation and self-reclamation have attracted a dedicated following of fellow outsiders who seek catharsis from physical and mental struggle. A chameleonic auteur guided by a multidisciplinary ethos, they craft entire worlds and personas through their music, weaving together everything from the classical canon, hypermodern internet cultures, academic theory, the esoteric, and their own carnal desires.
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While their critically-acclaimed 2022 breakthrough album Glitch Princess was driven by the digital realities and intimacies they discovered to cope with the reclusion of their teenage years, yeule found themselves careening back into another self-made world—this time, more somatic and tactile—during the isolation of the pandemic. At this time they began playing acoustic guitar obsessively for the first time since they were a kid and relistened to the early 2000s alt-rock music they grew up on, increasingly becoming immersed in their memories.
By setting inner musings to cathartic punk riffs and ethereal electronics, yeule crafted softscars, their debut album on Ninja Tune. On the blistering project, they closely examine the anatomy of their long held emotional wounds, making for their most penetrating and daring work yet. By liberating their repressed memories through images of blood, flames, porcelain, and angel wings, they honour the way that pain has shaped their past selves and built their instinct for self-protection.
Though its subject matter is heavy and arcane, there is a sense of joyful catharsis that emanates throughout the project, which was written and produced by yeule and Kin Leonn, with additional magic from Mura Masa and Chris Greatti’s production (Yves Tumor, Willow Smith). Driving it along is yeule’s shape shifting vocals, sounding more assured than ever in all of its jagged edges and haunting whispers, relaying the imperfect process of healing.
softscars also marks a new era of yeule embracing their musical project as who they truly are as a person. “I was forcing myself to separate myself from my artist persona and trying to tone myself down, because I felt like people wouldn’t like me if I was really that,” yeule explains. By becoming the otherworldly figure that once was of their imagination, they have now bridged the fractured identities that could only exist through different contexts and forms.
The bold actualization of yeule’s vision serves as a model for anyone else who wishes to break the mould and step into the next version of themself. “I feel like we’re always so silenced and turned down by everything in this world,” they add. “Don’t wear this, don’t do that, people always say. But once you stop seeing those as barriers, it’s like your whole life blossoms.”
yeule announces headline show at Button Factory, Dublin
Thursday, 23rd May 2024
Additional information and links:
- Tickets will go on sale Friday, 1st March ‘24 via this link HERE