![]() ![]() “When I leave my flesh, you can download my mind/And pick out the pretty parts for you,” they offer, lines that carry an extra heft considering that, as a lonely teenager existing mostly online, the idea of living on as a series of automated posts actually crossed yeule’s mind. It revolves around the idea of digital immortality. “Handcuffs and hospitals are some things I despise.” The song references disordered eating, a condition that yeule still struggles with, along with white lines and grams, bruises and loss. ![]() “25, traumatized, painting white on my eyes,” they sing sweetly, as if reading from a children’s book. On “software update,” a strung-out, meta power ballad that deserves to be met with a galaxy of swaying phone lights, yeule offers a micro autobiography that could work as a social-media bio for a blinkered generation. Mix all that with a dramatic self-loathing streak that Billy Corgan, Thom Yorke, or Gerard Way could appreciate, plus hints of Courtney Love’s confrontational spin on sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, and even some of Avril Lavigne’s middle-finger insolence (yeule has called the famed mall-punk’s 2002 debut, Let Go, particularly formative), and you have someone who’s balling up decades of misfit energy into art that speaks to our uniquely AI-addled times.Īgain and again, the album pulls off a delicate tightrope walk, balancing big, widespread feelings of modern disillusionment with harrowing personal details. That admiration resonates in their aesthetic bravado and alien otherness: They have cited Nintendo DS consoles and bottom-feeding deep-sea creatures as mood-board fodder for their ever-changing looks, which have recently hit upon a perfectly tattered midpoint between steampunk and cyberpunk, Mad Max: Fury Road and The Matrix.īowie can also be heard in softscars’ walloping emotion and the way yeule gives voice to today’s outcasts-Ziggy Stardust’s Gen-Z grandkids, dismantling gender normativity in the face of heightened violence and prejudice. When David Bowie died, a teenage yeule didn’t leave their room for a full week. ![]() They filled their 2021 covers album Nuclear War Post X with homespun takes on the Breeders, Big Thief, and the Velvet Underground, among others. In their youth, stifled by Singapore’s conservative society, they escaped into Smashing Pumpkins cassettes and bashed out Pixies songs as part of a band. Meanwhile, the 25 year old at its center continues to explore the infinite spaces between flesh and firmware, fantasy and reality, ones and zeroes.Īnd guess what? It turns out yeule is a very good rock star, a student of the game. The album, largely created by yeule alongside the exciting young producer Kin Leonn, delivers a vintage K-Rock playlist of corroded and gauzy styles, with souped-up dream-pop, emo, electro-folk, pop-punk, and grunge rushing by like fond teenage memories. ![]() They’re also looking to a much different, more retro realm for musical inspiration: alternative rock. And a cloak of reverb is finally lifted from their voice, revealing an expressive range: They can sound winningly whiny or wistful or utterly broken in vocals that are often echoed by pitch-bent doppelgangers, like a chorus of Gollums calling in from a choppy line. The album’s title defiantly references old self-harm scars that linger on yeule’s body, tangible reminders of past traumas and what it took to overcome them. “I like to think I’m doing just fine/I like to search my symptoms online,” goes one memorable lyric from 2022’s Glitch Princess.īut on softscars, yeule dives headlong into this thing called humanity, tussling with all of the chaos that comes with it. All the while they mostly sang in a hushed deadpan, wary of letting the real world encroach on their virtual existence. Yeule first started toying around with music production as a young teenager in the early 2010s, after they saw a live video of Grimes on the internet and thought, “This fucking bitch does it all by herself… so I’m gonna try.” Over the last few years, the non-binary digital native broke out with a couple of future-shocked electronic pop albums in the mold of Grimes, Charli XCX, and Björk, collecting a cult of Discord and Twitch fans along the way. ![]()
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