yeule Reveals an Honest Look at Pain with “Glitch Princess”

yeule creates music with unflinching grace.  Superseding the genres of ethereal, pixel-rock, and glitch often associated with them, yeule’s style is an emotionally saturated, softly cerebral take on pop music and themselves.  Their 2019 debut album Seratonin II mixed, written, and produced solely by themselves, garnered reviews of them as one of the most stylistically original artists. Now, in 2022 they include collaborators from Mura Masa to Danny L Harle to further their craft even more.  With their sophomore project, appropriately titled “Glitch Princess” they show us the intensely impassioning life of someone breaking apart and coming together again.

yeule Tells Us Who They Really Are

The album starts with a proper introduction of who yeule is with the lead single and opener.  My Name is Nat Cmiel is a straightforward spoken word poem listing everything that makes up yeule.  Taking up as little space as possible, the way music makes them feel, and obsessing over people before throwing them out to name a few.  It sets the tone for an album that journeys through the nuances of their mind and heart.

Right after, you jolt away into the life of Glitch Princess with the second track Electric.  It is quite literally a shock. Going from soft delicate moments to overpowering synths with pitchy operatic vocals, the song is an existential realization of themselves.  Then, Flowers are Dead is the guilt of imagining your end.  It’s heavy, like intentionally adding salt to your own wound because nothing matters anymore.  Transiting into Eyes, yeule gets overwhelmingly manic.  Between the serenading of “How can I burn out of my own real body?” boiling-over production, and lullaby-like delivery yeule shows the impossibility of living with darkness.

Nonetheless, there is love in this life.  A cold blue love.  Tohji, the only feature on the album assists yuele in painting the picture of loving when you have no love to give on Perfect Blue.  The second single from the album Don’t Be So Hard On Your Own Beauty has a similar message.  Arguably, it is the rawest.  With a guitar to guide them, yeule let’s go lyrically on this track.  Introspection in wanting to love yourself – but knowing you can’t – makes this song particularly gutwrenching.

“There is a fully realized world”

Then, Fragments is the breaking point in the album.  Here, this surreal track is like the most delicate piece of glass shattering on the ground.  The glitch-synth track is a pivotal point in the album.  It transitions into the pixel-rock track Too Dead Inside.  This is waking out of a coma, or, the picking up of the pieces of glass.  Even more, it is the brutal reality of ” relying on the darkness of my own demons” as yeule sings.  However, this important shift from overbearing self-depreciation into a check of one’s reality is what makes this album diverse.  There aren’t melancholy tracks one after another creating stagnancy.  Rather, there is a fully realized world being created.

From Cold to Firey Emotion

The peak in that world is the standout track Bites On My Neck.  Together with Mura Masa and Danny L Harle, yeule shows the ferocity of being in love.  They imagine their anguish with exhilarating beat drops and sweet and sour lyrics.  The eerily sweet tone of their voice combined with poignant screams is the recklessness that they’ve earned from the hell they didn’t ask for.  Regardless, there is truth in dealing damage.  I <3  U is the calm after creating that storm.  “You know I hurt myself/But I heart you” yeule concedes.  Further, ‘just be patient with me’ is the sentiment yeule leaves us with Friendly Machine.  With a sweeping, glitchy, production, the spoken word approach is a callback to the profile yeule creates with the opener.  Instead, this is the coronation of yeule being the Glitch Princess.  Into the unnerving Mandy, it seems as if yeule wants to show us that the constant attachment to saboteurs in their head doesn’t just go away.  Sometimes, they return. It’s pulsing and disorienting, but its message is not to be overlooked.

Nevertheless, the nearly 5-hour-long closer on the album is ambient bliss.  As an emotionally challenging album overall The Things They Did For Me Out Of Love brings rest.  Easily, you can drift off into calm.  The instrumental track is a final goodbye that you have been yearning to feel. At last, yeule brings us down from a heartwrenching look into what crumbling into a million fragments and piecing them back together looks like.  Undoubtedly, it is raw, true, and their most forthright project to date.