By channelling their rock sensibilities harder than ever, yeule comes through with their most euphoric and emotionally tangled album to date.
With their near perfect marriage of the digital and the emotional, yeule has proved to be one of the most compelling songwriters to come out of hyperpop. 2023’s softscars in particular was a mighty artistic statement for how it brought in more of a rock edge to their sound, and Evangelic Girl is a Gun is the fearless follow-through that takes that experimentation to its natural apex.
The instrumental palette remains largely the same – cloudy guitars, cycling synths, claustrophobic distortion – only this time the autotune is notably absent, meaning yeule’s meditations on fame feel all the more intimate, whether it be through the portrait of the tortured artist on ‘Dudu’, or on ‘Eko’ where the voices in their head become harder to silence the longer they’re under the spotlight.
But let’s be clear: this is not just another album about the pitfalls of fame. It’s a lot messier than that. From the heart-breaking love song in death on ‘VV’, to the equally devastating tribute to the boys who died during mandatory national service in Singapore on ‘1967’, there’s an emotional heft to this album that makes it easily their most cathartic to date.
It’s not all misery though. In fact, while yeule has always had an underrated strength for crafting unbelievably catchy hooks that cut through all the messy distortion, this album goes harder in that direction than ever before. Despite its bleakness, there’s an irresistible flair to the music on this album. Sturdy, muffled guitars are often the foundation, which the spasmodic electronics catapult off, with heavy clattering percussion adding some visceral momentum to a lot of these songs. The high points include the exhilarating hooks on ‘Eko’ and ‘Dudu’, how the rumbling percussion builds into the whirring maelstrom of ‘Saiko’, and how the unrelenting title track anchors yeule’s scathing critique of the music industry with meteoric precision.
By Evangelic Girl is a Gun‘s conclusion, yeule announces herself as an artist on a seemingly unstoppable upward trajectory, and they’ve reached that point by doing something truly unique. There’s blurring genres, then there’s dismantling them entirely and searching the resulting wreckage for something entirely new, and what yeule has found in that chaos is special indeed.
featured image: Vasso Vu
