And guess what? It seems yeule is an excellent rock star, a pupil of the sport. Of their youth, stifled by Singapore’s conservative society, they escaped into Smashing Pumpkins cassettes and bashed out Pixies songs as a part of a band. They crammed their 2021 covers album Nuclear Struggle Put up X with homespun takes on the Breeders, Huge Thief, and the Velvet Underground, amongst others. When David Bowie died, a teenage yeule didn’t depart their room for a full week. That admiration resonates of their aesthetic bravado and alien otherness: They’ve cited Nintendo DS consoles and bottom-feeding deep-sea creatures as mood-board fodder for his or her ever-changing appears to be like, which have just lately stumble on a wonderfully tattered midpoint between steampunk and cyberpunk, Max Max: Fury Street and The Matrix.
Bowie can be heard in softscars’ walloping emotion and the best way yeule provides voice to at the moment’s outcasts—Ziggy Stardust’s Gen-Z grandkids, dismantling gender normativity within the face of heightened violence and prejudice. Combine all that with a dramatic self-loathing streak that Billy Corgan, Thom Yorke, or Gerard Manner might respect, plus hints of Courtney Love’s confrontational spin on intercourse, medication, and rock’n’roll, and even a few of Avril Lavigne’s middle-finger insolence (yeule has referred to as the famed mall-punk’s 2002 debut, Let Go, significantly formative), and you’ve got somebody who’s balling up many years of misfit power into artwork that speaks to our uniquely AI-addled occasions.
Time and again, the album pulls off a fragile tightrope stroll, balancing huge, widespread emotions of contemporary disillusionment with harrowing private particulars. On “software program replace,” a strung-out, meta energy ballad that deserves to be met with a galaxy of swaying telephone lights, yeule affords a micro autobiography that might work as a social-media bio for a blinkered era. “25, traumatized, portray white on my eyes,” they sing sweetly, as if studying from a youngsters’s e-book. “Handcuffs and hospitals are some issues I despise.” The tune references disordered consuming, a situation that yeule nonetheless struggles with, together with white traces and grams, bruises and loss. It revolves across the thought of digital immortality. “Once I depart my flesh, you’ll be able to obtain my thoughts/And pick the gorgeous elements for you,” they provide, traces that carry an additional heft contemplating that, as a lonely teenager present largely on-line, the concept of dwelling on as a collection of automated posts truly crossed yeule’s thoughts. “software program replace” crests with yeule’s model of an algorithmic arena-rock hook—“I really like you child,” they belt atop distorted guitar chimes, maybe addressing their followers, their associates, their companion, themself, or all 4.
