“I feel like I’ve learned to enjoy leaving space more and more as I keep making music and writing,” explains Nilüfer Yanya. Speaking from Italy over Zoom, with shows in Poland, Turkey, and Norway looming ahead of her upcoming appearance at Green Man festival, the singer-songwriter examines the positive impact revisiting older songs after touring her critically acclaimed third studio album My Method Actor had on her latest EP, Dancing Shoes.
Reassessing the potential in surplus ideas from the My Method Actor sessions, Yanya and longstanding collaborator Wilma Archer’s four atmospheric arrangements for Dancing Shoes, led by airy vocals and wiry guitar motifs, serve as an extension of the 2024 LP while making room for glacial textures, sharp sonic edges and ruminative rhythmic elements that push her artistry into an even more sophisticated and assured position. For its 16 minute runtime, Yanya achieves the near-impossible for modern listeners by commanding your unbroken attention.
“The sonic identity is very much, in a way, the same as the album. Because it’s an EP, you don’t need to necessarily worry about how it’s all going to sit together, so you have a bit more room to explore. It was nice to bring out the softer side,” says Yanya. On last song ‘Just a Western’, Yanya craves silence: “Shut up, won’t you listen, won’t you?” Dancing Shoes harnesses a restorative quietness and calm. “We’re healing when nothing is spoken,” she intones on the EP’s enveloping opener, ‘Kneel.’
Listening has been crucial in furthering Yanya and Archer’s process, going back to her 2019 debut, Miss Universe. “The way that Wilma and I worked on the record and the EP is that he wrote the music and I focused on the melody and lyrics. There’s a lot of me listening to and enjoying the music for what it is and then working out the best place to put in my contribution as opposed to just being like, ‘here’s another idea, here’s this idea, and it’s filled this gap.’ It’s more of an appreciation for each other’s work,” she explains. In this way, she’s given an opportunity to step back and conscientiously survey the potential of the canvas to tastefully reflect her personality while knowing when enough details have been added. “Lyrically, instead of making it more clear what something is about, I decided to reduce things and leave more up to the listener to interpret or leave more up to chance.”
Unravelling the thread of Nilüfer Yanya’s Baker’s Dozen, an appreciation for albums untethered to the time and place they were created became abundantly clear. World building, too, is integral to several of her selections and the way these albums, and the artists behind them, have instilled the confidence to keep pursuing and nurturing her artistic evolution. Whether that’s exploring atypical textures or performance styles, embracing weird ideas or simply allowing chance to play its role in the process, Nilüfer Yanya shows the power in simplicity and space.
Nilüfer Yanya’s new EP Dancing Shoes is out now via Ninja Tune. She performs at this year’s Green Man, which takes place from 14 to 17 August.
To begin reading her Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Selection’ below.
