Love bites, and Yunè Pinku is aware of it. “Nonetheless hurts to blush,” the Irish-via-South London electro-pop producer sings on her 2023 EP Babylon IX, distilling all of the ache factors of infatuation—embarrassment, unrequited emotions, the information that you simply’re at another person’s mercy—into 4 easy phrases. Then she offers the disturbing kicker: “It nonetheless heals to chop.” Earlier than urgent play on her new challenge, Scarlet Lamb, a listener is confronted with the picture of two younger sheep, slaughtered and organized on an ornate silver dish. Off to the facet seems to be a ceremonial blade that, one imagines, may be employed in some kind of Celtic pagan ritual. The six songs inside discover Yunè chopping deeper, embracing a darkness that provides new contours and a assured sense of management to her songwriting and manufacturing.
It doesn’t take lengthy for the titular animals to reappear on Scarlet Lamb. Opening observe “Midnight Oil” finds Yunè delivering a barely-sensical collage of bloodied lambs, seashells and salt licks, zephyr fingers and rubber bands over a trip-hop-inflected home beat. Nonetheless, just a few strains stick out for his or her relative directness: “The place is the recipe to being what I all the time want?” she inquires “The place is the guts in me?” Realizing Yunè wrote the music about recovering from burnout by connecting with nature lends some coherence to the lyrics’ frenzied imagery. However she does not allow you to see her sweat; on the music’s bridge, Yunè strips away the haze, cranks up the bass, and slips right into a pitched-down, sprechstimme register. For eight bars, the twilight seashore glitches right into a catwalk, strobe lights slicing via the gloom.
Nonetheless, when Scarlet Lamb’s manufacturing falters, the cracks in its writing begin to present. On the extra stripped-down “Concorde,” Yunè sings “it’s you who colours me blue,” however she’s not touching Lana Del Rey’s supply of virtually the identical line. Even the music’s central metaphor has been accomplished higher lately. With its bouncy keyboards buried in misty synth washes, “Half Alive” is probably the most akin to Yunè’s impressed earlier work; put the phrases on a web page, although, and so they’re all platitude, missing the heart and viscera that made a observe like “Blush Reduce” so compelling. “Don’t Cease,” in the meantime, is stuffed with ear-catching instrumental prospers—glimmers of electrical guitar suggestions, a distorted vocoder breakdown—but its inert melody leaves the music much less of a richly textured inky black, and extra like a muted gray. As one other portrait of creative fatigue, it really works—however nearly too properly.
Having plumbed the wells of UK storage and techno on earlier releases, Yunè continues to be at her most creatively fruitful when wanting backwards. Right here, she faucets into the sounds of her native Eire. “Reckless Sensation,” maybe Scarlet Lamb’s finest music, imagines an alternate ’90s the place The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan sang on Large Assault’s “Teardrop.” Whereas different artists have experimented with an identical palette, to various levels of success (the nice: Caroline Polachek’s cowl of “Breathless” and the bagpipe solo on “Blood and Butter”; the dangerous: Rina Sawayama’s underwhelming, Corrs-inspired “Catch Me within the Air”) Yunè’s completely at dwelling towards a backdrop of shuffling drums and—for the primary time on a Yunè Pinku music—gently strummed acoustic guitar. It’s neither a nightmare nor a reverie; fairly, she’s managed to imitate the blissful oblivion of a very dreamless sleep. Possibly that’s the place the actual consolation lies.