Review Summary: Find myself, lose myself, be myself, fuck myself
Yeule is abstract and real. Feelings are abstract and real. Music is abstract and real. One of the reasons music is so powerful is that it performs deep-reaching emotional truths that we would otherwise struggle to access or meaningfully engage with, suddenly rendering them almost effortlessly graspable. Good musicians allow us a chance for their performances to inhabit our realities, however fleetingly; some great ones do this cogently enough that we can trace the imprint of a whole human being through them. This is Yeule, now more than ever. Yeule? A digital ghost on 2019’s
Serotonin II, just about glimpsable behind endless reverb and cryptic lyrics. They were real: you could feel them hiding. On
Glitch Princess, they are everywhere and everything. They map themselves. They make themselves real, explicitly so. Opener “My Name is Nat Çmiel”’s broken, digitalised phrasing checks off gender fluidity, ailing mental health, eating disorders, cocaine abuse, reclusion, online immersion, self-harm, and intimacy issues like the autobiography of someone thoroughly in touch with their own existence yet constantly dissociating between overlapping realities. The rest of
Glitch Princess unpacks each of these in unflinching detail.
Flush my vomit down the drain / think of my body getting hit by a train opens “Friendly Machine”, lines few lyricists could land in most contexts and even fewer vocalists could raise beyond the reach of irony. Over Yeule’s oppressively frigid industrial soundscapes and tremulous synthlines, more flicker and quaver than discernible melody, their content is entirely self-explanatory. It always is. Very little about this record demands unpacking. Its aesthetics translate the weight of its subject matter with astonishing fluency, skeletal beats, evasive layerings and bursts of distortion every inch the echo of a living voice in a dead space. Its songwriting is “pop” and appropriately so - is there any better vehicle for immediacy? Don’t confuse immediacy for gratification: anyone who reduces
Glitch Princess to an admittedly impeccably crafted collection of glitch-pop songs has missed the point. Yeule inhabits this album. It’s uncomfortable. Their world is uncomfortable: it’s infectious and at points exhilarating, but it’s wilfully unstable and candid to extents prohibitive of safe distance. It’s real. It’s the kind of liminal-real that anyone can identify with if they’ve ever questioned their own reality while trapped between worlds, real or unreal or online or all. And it’s beautiful. It’s full of pockets of catharsis, some of which cement its maze of dissociation and trauma, some of which are full of love, or a yearning for love, or a scrambled ideal of love. Balanced on the bleeding edge of Yeule’s morbid visions,
Glitch Princess practically crackles with vitality and affirmation in their desperate, unadulterated, damaged, awkward willingness to show all and be heard. Does that make it inspiring or depressing? I don’t care. It’s the most meaningful music I’ve heard in years. Ten fucking stars.
