Yeule - Glitch Princess Review
The ethereal enchanter ‘Glitch Princess’ enters the room.
‘My name is Nat Ćmiel/ I am 22 years old/I like music, dancing ballet/Crushing up rocks and snorting them/And genderless people,’ resound the first digitalized vocal line of yeule’s second album, ‘Glitch Princess’. Yeule slides into our speakers as if they were a representative of alien-advanced civilisation, startled by the discovery of a nearby void.
While we’re stuck deciphering the code, the other version of yeule lives as a non-binary Singaporean, London-based artist and art-pop enchanter. During adolescence and developing hikikomori’s traits (a form of social withdrawal), they’ve connected and found comfort in online communities. Ever since, yeule’s mission is to break up their surface shell and sneak the part of the core inside of her art, embodying any of their chameleon-like avatars.
The fantasy they paint in the album seems so fragile that we should feel beyond honoured to be invited in. It’s like an intergalactic, enclosed sanctuary filled with strange flowers and rare birds. To come in we need to strip off all layers of mental and physical presumptions. Be pure. ‘Glitch Princess’, though praising the (un)holy, is a perfectionist: production’s polished, glimmering distortions give the impression as if we’re always about to lose connection and yeule can fade away to their CGI castle in the digi-neverland any second.
‘Glitch Princess’ lures us in with ‘My Name Is Nat Ćmiel’, narrating us through the gateways of yeule’s digital, build on humane skeleton, landscape. It’s an ambivalence powered manifesto, praising opposites like deities - ‘I like touching myself/And I like being far away from my own body’; ‘I like being a boy, I like being a girl/I like getting fucked, and I like to fuck.’ They’re onto the quest for a cure for the schism.
In an exquisitely ethereal ‘Electric’, yeule express their feeling to someone else and uses them as a newly-build shield for the void. Isn’t that all we dream of when in despair? Though the relief is brief. ‘Flowers Are Dead’ revokes the excruciating pain of existence and realisation of having the body that's forced to exist on a physical realm. The sound here is morphing into itself in an echo-like manner. It only caresses your skin but is enough to send shivers straight to the heart. ‘Perfect Blue’ featuring Tohji interrupts the stream, sounding like an anime opening track on accepting the insecurities and refusing to bend over for anyone. It cracks like cute glitch-pop candy.
‘...Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty’ arrives as a soft-spoken pop song that quickly transmutes into a river-of-tears-provoking lyrical masterpiece. Yeule’s insides are burning fire but there’s someone who can withstand, reassure their tormented soul, ‘When I’m/ With you I no longer have tainted flesh’. ‘Fragments’ continue on the narrative, formed into a wave provoked by instrumental electro-experimentations. It feels like you’re suffocating underwater but it’s ok. Someone is holding your hand as you slowly lose sanity.
In ‘Too Dead Inside’ Glitch Princess is disguised in a cloak of pop melody while secretly wanting to sacrifice their abyss to the sunrise. Only darkness challenges the will. The fight’s on, ‘Teach me how to love myself/I'm not dead yet, I never forget’. It gets rougher in ‘Bites on My Neck’ where love got sick and puked blue melancholia. Fast rap-like lines cut through the hard background beats.
Bruised and battered down, in high-pitched beeps, we got introduced to the ‘Friendly Machine’. It teleports us to, what seems to be, the core of yeule’s identities’ crises, bugged with drug urges, eating disorders and self-abuse. It’s cathartic to witness a confession-like vulnerability when the artist begs the artificial being for a mental relief. Cure is nowhere near.
When the illusion breaks down, ‘Mandy’ brings temporary salvation in letting it all out. Rage to industrial grunge scarred sounds. Vent. Revolt to drowning in distortion voices, growing out of each other. This demon’s trying morphing its formless flesh into something tangible, ‘We'll make it go away/ The pain can go away/They said it'd go away.
‘Glitch Princess’ leaves us speechless to contemplate ‘The Things They Did for Me Out of Love’ for exactly 4 hours and 44 minutes. The track produced long by Danny L Harle is an almost non-lyrical ambient, ethereal enigma fed on blissful synths.
Yeule’s a brave warrior who dares to open dialogue about bulimia, suicidal thoughts, body dysmorphia and depression that exist in every dimension, no matter if digital or physical.
They set themselves up on a quest for a cure against the abyss that though inspiring doesn’t bring any new answers. Perhaps, Yeule had them to start with, written in between the lines of ambivalence and an equal exploration of both sides of any binary.
With headquarters online, Yeule doesn’t want to hide behind the screen. The imminent wish is for us to see inside their core. Access the hard drive to where they’ve exported the most authentic parts of themselves. In the end, they’ve released them into the ether. Not everything real is physical. Most important things live in abstract spaces. That’s where yeule wants us to enter. It doesn’t mean they’re free of pain. Quite the opposite. But while hacking the system, they wrote the code to crack in-between the solid reality to create their own in the crevice. We bow to that.