Nilüfer Yanya has announced details of her second album PAINLESS set for release on 4 March 2022 via ATO Records. She has also shared the album’s lead single ‘Stabilise’ which arrives first on Tuesday alongside is accompanying video by longtime creative collaborator Molly Daniel.
Over a clipped guitar line and frenetic beat new single, the stripped and raw ‘Stabilise’ is an urgent release from mundanity and lowered horizons. Yanya sings “There’s nothing out there / For you and me / I’m going nowhere”. It is a song about the mundanity of the city where dog fights, small flats, and endless high-rise buildings can induce claustrophobia. “I was really thinking about your surroundings and how much they influence or change your perception of things. A lot of the city is just grey and concrete, there’s no escape,” she says, “A lot of people don’t leave the city their whole lives, wherever they’re from. It’s weird because the chorus is about going nowhere and I really didn’t want that [originally] but it was like the song was trying to tell me something.”
PAINLESS is the follow-up to Nilüfer Yanya’s renowned 2019 debut album Miss Universe, which fully established her as a singular artist and a distinctive voice that simply has to be heard.
Nilüfer Yanya will return to the stage for Pitchfork Music Festival London, co-headlining Hackney Church on 13 November with Moses Boyd and supported by Emma-Jean Thackray, and cktrl. Tickets are entirely sold out for the event already.
PAINLESS is a record that forces the listener to sit with the discomfort that accompanies so many of life’s biggest challenges whether it be relationship breakdowns, coping with loneliness, or the search for our inner self. “It’s a record about emotion,” Yanya explains. “I think it’s more open about that in a way that Miss Universe wasn’t because there’s so many cloaks and sleeves with the concept I built around it.” She adds, summing up the ethos of the new album, “I’m not as scared to admit my feelings”.
