22-year-old London soul singer Nilüfer Yanya (who is of Turkish, Irish and Bajan heritage) may only have two EPs under her belt, but her poignant evocations of youthful heartbreak and her resonant voice have already earned her recognition from The Guardian (“One to Watch”), FADER (“The Best New British R&B”) and Pitchfork (for her “brilliantly nonchalant guitar soul”). New Yorker critic Amanda Petrusich included her second EP Plant Feed as her ten best albums of 2017. She applauded Yanya’s ability to conjure “several universes of feeling” in just three songs and claimed to have been nourished by the therapeutic jazz-inflected sonic portrait of emotional limbo in standout single “Golden Cage.”
Yanya’s music video (which features a crimson-clad cult) for her latest song “Thanks 4 Nothing” has more production value than her previous videos, but the song follows in the aesthetic footsteps of her previous work. She has cited Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse, and Pixies as vocal inspirations; her warm and husky voice matches their abilities to convey a multitude of emotions with apparent ease and convincing rawness. There’s a cool disaffection in the mix as well, making her output dramatic but never theatrical. Here, in her “most bitter & ungrateful song yet”, she accepts, laments and ruminates on the termination of a pivotal relationship: ‘This is the end/ I don’t think we can be friends/ Just being honest/ 'cause I don’t want to make things better/ Thanks for nothing, lasts forever.’
She smoothly mourns what was, ponders the gravity of decision with pregnant pauses, and climatically buries the possibility of making up as the drumbeat intensifies. She may be less forthcoming about her emotions in real life (‘I’ve been keeping this way too clean/ Wasn’t telling you what I mean’), but this is never the case in her music.
