yeule Creates a New Self With the Intriguing ‘Evangelic Girl is a Gun’ (Review)

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

What you need to get about yeule is that they are, first and foremost, a cyborg. Part-human, part-avatar, plugged into pop extensions that lead into the deep underground. It is through this portal that the music of Nat Ćmiel, the Singaporean artist behind yeule, can be somewhat grasped like a decaying bath bomb. Ćmiel takes all elements of the electropop universe and melds together thorny, personal dreamscapes to create something strange and gripping. Is it hyperpop? Is it bedroom pop? Grimes-lite? As one artist echoed last year, they’re everything and more.

yeule 1.0 – 3.0

Their second album, ‘Glitch Princess’, is their manifesto right down to the title. Building on the sparseness of their debut ‘Serotonin II’, ‘Glitch Princess’ produced deeply ambitious moments. There is the 4-hour, 44-minute instrumental ‘The Things They Did for Me Out of Love’, presumably acting as a soundtrack for your next acid trip. ‘Bites on My Neck’ was a masterpiece that used piano trinkets, guitar swells, and bops to produce an arresting paean to the pain of passion. 

Their artistic exploration then simultaneously explodes and implodes in the gorgeous third album ‘softscars’, released in 2023. Each track – like ‘sulky baby’ and ‘dazies’ – represented a specific trauma, with shoegaze and rock elements added to an ever-expanding palette that made the yeule project larger than life. All this forces us to wrestle with Ćmiel’s reincarnations that are reborn again and again as a ravenous, bottomless, genre-eating entity. 

yeule 4.0

So what is yeule 4.0? As the title suggests, ‘Evangelic Girl is a Gun’ is a cocktail of the beautiful and the violent. ‘Tequila Coma’, the unusually low-key opener, contains this key line whispered amidst distorted guitars and trip-hop beats: “She’s dark and divine / Sacrificial lamb of mine.”. With a cadre of producers that includes A.G. Cook, Mura Masa, and Clams Casino, Ćmiel never shies away from mixing and matching the pretty and the ugly.

If you’re unsure about their intentions, look no further than the latest music video for ‘What3vr’. As a painter in an earlier life, this artist sees their inner world in visuals as much as sound. Against the background of this chilled-out, Portishead-inspired tune, yeule pulls out a trinket with their mouth from a blood-sputtering doppelganger before taking their own life with a gun. It’s bewitching and brutal. It sets the stage for what’s to come.

What comes forth in ‘Evangelic Girl is a Gun’. For the most part, this is an intoxicating mix of the febrile and the wistful. ‘Eko’ sees Ćmiel twisting their vocals into a metallic echo on top of a catchy indie-pop beat, all while lightly describing their inner castle falling down. Moreover, in ‘Saiko’, yeule throws all their spices into this potent blender that moves from stripped-down introspections to a feverish club-beat to a cool demarcating sound of a reloading gun. The album’s standout titular song goes so hard, a sonic gushing over industrial beeps and licks that wouldn’t be out of place in a Charli xcx remix album. In summary, it’s one of the pop world’s most dynamic tracks of the year.

Yet again, yeule swerves against type by tapping into some surprisingly accessible elements. Close your eyes when you’re listening to the buoyant ‘Dudu’ and you could be forgiven for thinking you’re lying on a beach on beabadoobee island. But this tune, as hooky as it is with an easily hummable melody line, hides its true nature underneath. “Another day, another dose / Medicinal genius / Cut a line, have a cry / Unstable butterfly.”. These lyrics point to the drugged-up aftermath that yeule is stuck in, under the surface of sunny stylings. 

For an artist that revels in self-deconstruction, perhaps the only drawback is that you always would prefer a full-throated yeule who takes no prisoners. For example, in tunes like ‘VV’ and ‘The Girl Who Sold Her Face’, yeule taps into their guitar-dominant, singer-songwriter self. But you always wait to see if they lift off into something more risky. This is only because the highs of past and present versions are so glorious. ‘Evangelic Girl is a Gun’ represents the latest planet orbiting the yeule-verse. While not the one filled with the most innard-spewing volcanoes and mind-melding roller-coasters, is still one of the year’s most entertaining visits.  

Rating: 7/10

yeule is on Instagram and TikTok. Stream the album below or buy here and read more reviews here.

About The Author