The Off Beat: Nilüfer Yanya Isn’t Acting

Nilüfer Yanya (photo by Molly Daniels)

Despite its origins as a showcase of psychedelic music, Levitation has expanded in recent years – especially after co-founders the Black Angels brought back Austin Psych Fest as a separate event in 2023 – to celebrate all types of alternative music. This Halloweekend, Austin welcomes OGs of noise rock (the Jesus Lizard), shoegaze (Slowdive), and metal (Boris), plus modern-ish favorites across post-punk (Dry Cleaning), chillwave (Washed Out), and electroclash (the Dare). To represent both ends of the old-new spectrum, the Chronicle caught up with post-punk giants Gang of Four, who play the Far Out Lounge Nov. 1, and singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya, who plays Mohawk Nov. 3. 

Compared to Nilüfer Yanya’s tone-shifting 2022 album PAINLESS, where skittering breakbeats and frenetic arpeggios brushed against bruised ballads, this year’s insular follow-up My Method Actor – where the singer’s husky, honeyed voice overpowers even the most fuzzed-out guitars – feels more chill.

Yanya agrees to an extent, but also pushes back. “Some of it isn’t chill,” she laughs. Besides some louder sonics, she’s referring to her words. “Everyone’s like, 'Are you okay?’ After they read the lyrics,” she says.

Indeed, My Method Actor’s confessions of broken relationships, the pressures of fame, and an unending need for control sound pretty melancholy. Yet Yanya finds hope in even her most dour compositions.

The songwriter explains the refrain of album highlight “Call It Love” (“Some call it love/ I call it shame”) comes from her fear of expressing her desires out loud. “You don’t want to say the thing that you want because you’re afraid you won’t get it,” she says. Still, she qualifies:

“I guess it’s a bit of a bummer, but I always saw it as, you’ve got to follow yourself. You’ve got to be your own guide, you’ve got to really trust your own [instincts] of what you want to be or where you want to go, what move you want to make next.”

An admittedly impressionistic writer, Yanya often talks about her songs in the third person. On another self-proclaimed favorite, “Binding,” she says, “The person or the character or the narrator is trying to disappear and trying to rid themselves of their body, almost. [They want] to go off into an abyss. ... It sounds like someone who’s either drank too much or taken too much or something. They’re a bit gone. I’ve always imagined it like [you’re] in a car, looking at the dashboard or something, and it’s dark.”

Writing in character, not as herself, might explain why Yanya named the LP My Method Actor. “The theory is, you’re not acting because you’ve studied the character so much ... you’ve used your own experiences and your own memories to build a seamlessness between the two things,” she says. “So when you go onstage, you’re not going to think about your lines or what the character feels. You just feel it instead.”

It’s not that easy for the musician, though. When performing, Yanya says, “I don’t really have a character to step into. I just have to be myself.”