The Londoner reflects on her old-school ascent to jazzy indie greatness, her
Turkish heritage and reaching out to refugee kids
![Nilüfer Yanya: ‘I wasn’t thinking: how am I going to make this a TikTok hit’](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4c062e3b6069dcd3500a393c4ed568de255b3c41/0_121_2048_1228/master/2048.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=4cc0c51a2c10ad444d96ec70d91fc4fa)
Nilüfer Yanya may have grown up in
Chelsea, but hers is not the world of the Sloane Ranger 2.0: pristine Georgian townhouses and endless champagne brunches. Instead, it is the manic, deadening, claustrophobic side of the city that radiates through her work: on recent single Stabilise, the 26-year-old sings of never-ending high rises, filled with small flats “rotten to the core”. “Grey concrete,” she says. “I see that immediately when the song starts. A literal grey but also an emotional grey.”
Today we are in the first kind of
London – a posh, gleaming, pink-accented coffee shop in Bayswater – discussing Yanya’s upcoming second album, Painless, a collection of prickly, occasionally jazzy, and always catchy post-punk that lands somewhere between Joy Division, King Krule and PJ Harvey. It is the sequel to 2019’s rave-reviewed Miss Universe, a record that heralded this unassuming, smiley woman as one of Britain’s most exciting new rock stars.