Songs of the Week spotlights great new tunes and analyzes notable releases. Find our new favorites and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist, and for other great songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, Nilüfer Yanya, Remi Wolf, and NxWorries dominate the Friday landscape.
Method acting can feel a bit oxymoronic, striving for authenticity while becoming fully immersed in a character. But the goal is to adjust to someone else’s reality so fully that the audience doesn’t know they’re seeing a performance.
While Nilüfer Yanya is less concerned with the effectiveness of the practice, she is interested in leveraging it as a metaphor about pretense and honesty. “People like you and me get jaded/ People like us, our dreams get faded,” she sings on the new track, titled “Method Actor.” Here, she’s left entirely bereft in the wake of a relationship gone wrong, mourning the loss of someone who put on a performance strong enough to fool her. “I gave you everything,” she points out four separate times.
The British artist has a particular knack for bridging genres in her music, and “Method Actor” is no exception. Light bossa nova beats dance through the verses, but the chorus pivots into something heavy and dissonant; the melody throughout the song floats, unbothered, in a way that feels aloof from any instrumental directions. If it’s whiplash-inducing, it’s by design; there’s something to be said for the confusion associated with sifting through the intentions of a duplicitous partner.
“Just shake with laughter, my method actor,” she coos in resignation. It’s another especially strong release from Yanya, whose entrancing “Like I Say (I runaway)” was included on our list of 100 best songs of the year so far.