yeule: Glitch Princess

Press materials for Glitch Princess describe yeule as a cyborg. Though that idea isn’t explicit in the lyrics, it’s present in the way they fashion themself as if they’re not fully autonomous, as if their identity is the responsibility of some external creator. “Always want but never need/I don’t have an identity I can feed,” they sing on “Friendly Machine.” To begin to understand what’s going on inside their mind, yeule treats their existence as something veritably strange. They rhyme “amphetamine,” a stimulant, with “amitriptyline,” an antidepressant, curious about the ways we can manipulate our bodies though we’ll never be able to fully control them. Modern medicine is full of “couplings between organism and machine” wrote Donna Haraway in her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a challenge for feminism to move away from the rigidity of identity politics. That sense of otherness is central to Yeule’s conception of cyborg-hood; it provides them access to their most core sense of humanity.

On “Bites on My Neck” they sing: “I had to walk into the fire to know how to feel,” simultaneously invoking a resurrection through pain and the flame-licked birth of Frankenstein’s monster. By holding themself at a remove from the rest of humanity, yeule seems to explore basic experiences as if for the first time. “Electric” considers the touch of another as a rapturous event. The song cracks open with an inhuman wail that recalls the esoteric birdsong on Björk’s Utopia—a hook whose strangeness magnifies the song’s wide-eyed, pleading admission that “you’re the only one who knows me.” It’s the voice of a being whose suffering and salvation feel beyond their control—a perspective at odds with other musical cyborgs, like Holly Herndon or Charli XCX, whose art addresses the ways that technology can expand notions of empathy, community, and pleasure.

They give themself a short reprieve from despair on “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty,” an emo-leaning acoustic confession that arrives like a solar flare at the album’s midpoint. The song opens in media res: “Currently,” they sing in a sharp coo, “the sullen look on your face tells me you see something in me more pure than this dirty.” The strumming guitar keeps pace with yeule’s tumbling stream of lyrics, as if slowing down might extinguish this rare good feeling. Their words are tinged with hope but are still no rebuke to the self-hatred that saturates the record; the moment they step away from the person they’re singing to, yeule returns to their own “tainted flesh.”

Personal disaster occurs at the same scale as actual apocalypse on Glitch Princess. Where yeule once favored synthetic harp swells and breathy vocal harmonies, there’s now industrial booms, throbbing audio feedback, and synths like thousands of bottle rockets whistling off into the sky at once. The enormity of the sounds make mundane actions—bleeding, eating, having sex—feel precipitous. yeule sings about leaving their “real” body, suggesting there’s somewhere else for consciousness to go. Maybe there will be soon, and we’ll indeed have to re-learn those essential behaviors as if from the beginning. For all their pessimism, yeule offers one consolation: When contemplating the body’s destruction, needs that might have otherwise been hidden can unselfconsciously emerge, like to be seen or known or loved completely.

Buy: Rough Trade

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