Similarly, at a time when the idea of the “era” has pervaded the culture to such an extent that the highest-grossing tour of all time is all about these dramatic album-to-album pivots, it’s refreshing to see an artist take a different, equally self-assured approach—one of quiet, considered evolution. My Method Actor may be unmistakably a Nilüfer Yanya album, but its tone also feels markedly different from what’s come before. Instead of taking the unexpected electronic elements of her previous record, Painless, to more dramatic heights, Yanya dials them back to create a sonic landscape that is both subtle and lush, flitting between moments of almost spartan emptiness and dense, atmospheric strings or the loose strum of a guitar. “Exploring the softness, I think that’s a new thing for me,” Yanya says. “And instead of trying to be clever with the songwriting, it’s like we were trying to simplify it.”
On repeat listens, the album also begins to seem a little cryptic. As the lyrics unfurl, they seem less like excavations from the depths of Yanya’s inner world, and more like vignettes from the lives of someone she might have passed on the street, or seen sitting in a cafe. (“Gonna scream out, there’s no meaning / Spit my teeth out as you’re bleeding / I gave you everything you needed,” she sings with ferocity on the album’s title track, which has a touch of the surreal.) The clue to unlocking it all may lie in that title. “I became really fascinated with the theory behind method acting, and the fact that you’re kind of no longer acting, because you’ve become the character and the character has become you. You’re using your own memories to become them, and I relate to that a lot in music, in writing, in performing. But I don’t really have a character to become—I just have to really use myself to become more of myself. It’s not the same thing, but there’s a correlation.”
That’s not to say that there aren’t other, more ambiguous personas that Yanya slips into and embodies throughout My Method Actor. “I think there are a lot of hints on the album around memory being made up of other people’s memories, and how your memories shift the way you see the world,” she adds. “And sometimes they lie to you—so you always have to be learning and unlearning those memories.”