An ode to sensitivity: Nilüfer Yanya’s hypnotic sophomore album Painless

Nilüfer Yanya’s ethereal sophomore album Painless (ATO, 2022) chronicles the complexities of loneliness and uncertainty. The Chelsea artist’s brutal honesty adds an edge to her signature dreamy, pop-rock sound. Despite the varied influences, which range from jazz to electronic, the soloist creates a cohesive album. Yanya’s voice both oozes and scratches against itself. Coupled with the mixed tempos and different energies of the songs, she crafts a record with remarkable range and heart. 

In 2016, Yanya released her Small Crimes EP, a mellow pairing of songs, which she followed with 2017’s Plant Feed EP. She soon picked up the pace in her 2018 hit “Baby Luv.” The song’s chorus of “do you like pain?” now seems like a premonition of Painless. On Painless, Yanya continues to look for the answer to this question. 

Painless deals with feelings of isolation while social pressures challenged Nilüfer Yanya on her debut album Miss Universe (ATO, 2019). A conceptual storyline punctuates Miss Universe; at the beginning of the album, an unsettlingly calm voice discusses Phase 1 of an imaginary health program – the WWAY Health program. The voice of WWAY Health lists symptoms of social anxiety and inquires if the listener has experienced any. The program, continued in a few songs throughout the album, offers freedom from these feelings. By positioning the album’s listener as a program user, Yanya indicates the possible use of music as a respite from worry. Yanya’s second album searches for a coexistence of freedom and self-understanding. Unlike WWAY Health, Painless does not promise to solve any problems.

Painless is a record whose strength comes from Yanya herself. Without the WWAY Health segments of Miss Universe or any guest features, the record stands triumphantly on its own. The record’s sincerity strikes as it discusses seemingly paradoxical feelings; Yanya feels trapped in being alone, yearns for stability without monotony, and searches for freedom while feeling hopeless. 

As a solo artist, Yanya possesses particular skill at evoking the push and pull within herself by building and releasing vocal tension. Precise instrumentals complement Yanya’s effortlessly smooth voice. As her voice sometimes lilts in a delicately Dolores O’Riordan way, it arcs in and out of each word. As she sings, Yanya creates the sense that each word lives within her breath, excavated from her body. The vocals in Painless strike a balance between spoken and sung. Yanya uses her bare but evocative lyrics to weave these two modes of storytelling together into an intimate narrative.

The album’s instrumentals seem to draw from the sounds of groups popular in the early 2000s, such as Flunk, Peter Bjorn and John, and The Strokes. Trip hop and new wave influences also appear on the album and lend it its hypnotic feeling. As with other works by Yanya, guitar underpins many of the songs on Painless. She makes her love of the instrument’s range evident both in the buoyant chords of “shameless” and on the stripped-down track “trouble.” From energetic synth drum beats to surf-rock-inspired bass, the variety of musical influences add an undeniable depth to Yanya’s album. 

Painless opens with “the dealer,” an energetic song that bares its emotions from the beginning. The first line, “it’s been weighing on my mind,” immediately brings the listener inside Yanya’s mental world for the duration of the album. As Yanya vocalizes her need to “work out who this is,” one wonders if she questions who she herself is, or if the query is about another person. Throughout the album, self-discovery and relationships with others twist together.

In “stabilise,” Yanya asserts her self-assuredness. The fast-paced, precise instrumentation of “stabilise” evokes a sound reminiscent of The Strokes. In the music video, Yanya seamlessly shifts from runner to leather-clad spy to rock star. She finishes the video thrashing about with her guitar as the crowds’ curls tangle together. Although she wonders if she’ll stabilize, the lyrics also show that she may already be where, and who, she needs to be. 

The longest track on the record, “trouble,” pinpoints loneliness as the cause of a fragile sadness. The bare music with hints of dissonance complements Yanya’s hypnotic vocals. Yanya reveals the cause of her loneliness as “the way that you’d hold me” – it originates from physical closeness to another. Similarly, she refers to herself and her partner as “strangers side by side / strangers all our lives.” Despite her best efforts to incorporate another into her life, she still feels alone. 

“Get me off this spinning wheel,” Yanya requests in “midnight sun.” Falling, just for its freedom from the cycle of repetition, may be worth the pain. Then, in the buoyant track “shameless,” Yanya feels betrayed by another, and by her own emotions. Although being caught may seem more appealing than falling, Yanya calls it “graceless” and describes herself as “faithless.” The freedom before hitting the ground and feeling the arrival of pain is not permanent, and being caught makes Yanya feel trapped. Thus, her self-sufficiency shines through. 

Later, in “company,” Yanya harkens back to the WWAY Health plot and increases the album’s sense of otherworldly isolation with the line “hello human, is that your voice?” In the track, she finds solace in knowing that others also feel loneliness and exhaustion. Feelings can be friends, too. 

The record ends with an acknowledgment of being lost on the track “anotherlife.” Less frenetic than “the dealer,” the song leaves the listener feeling wiser. Yanya asks to be believed by another, indicating that she has reached belief in her own emotions. 

Despite its title, Painless sagely realizes that emotion can be a valuable way to further understand and connect with the self. At the end of the album, Yanya does not find an ultimate freedom like the paradisiacal escape the user of WWAY Health searches for in Miss Universe. Instead, Painless is a highly sensitive record that reveals becoming fully painless may render one unable to appreciate other emotions.

Written by Liv Bjorgum