Nilüfer Yanya expands her musical horizons with Miss Universe

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      A few years back, just as she was starting to build a reputation as one of the U.K.’s most promising young artists, Nilüfer Yanya signed on for an initiative run by her sister, called Artists in Transit.

      The London, England–based siblings started travelling to Greece, where, in refugee camps and squats, they helped oversee food distribution and work programs. In addition to games and sports, art classes have been a major part of Artists in Transit.

      “My sister said, ‘I want to go do these refugee workshops in Athens,’ ” Yanya says, on the line from a Chicago tour stop. “So I did it with her for the first time in 2016. I think of myself as quite an open-minded person, but I was surprised at how, when you really commit to going and meeting new people, barriers start to break down in your head.

      “So we’ve done it for the last three years,” she continues, “and what we’ve seen is the program getting more varied with more people involved. It’s something I never want to stop doing. Becoming someone’s friend is one of the most important things you can do. People don’t want to feel like they aren’t being seen and totally disregarded. We all want to connect with others.”

      Yanya is doing just that with a career that’s already yielded a couple of glowingly received EPs, Small Crimes and Plant Feed. Those records got her flagged as a heaven-sent prodigy out to combine the best of PJ Harvey, Amy Winehouse, and Adele.

      Her upcoming full-length, Miss Universe, which arrives next month, builds on that promise, touching on everything from chillout-room soul (the aptly named “Paradise”) to Kraftwerk-tinted trip-hop (“Baby Blu”) to metal-machine alternative (“In Your Head”) to ocean-breeze new-wave reggae (“Paralyzed”).

      What’s immediately striking about Miss Universe is the way that the record (whose music is interspersed with short but soothing fake ads for a self-help centre) starts out on the dark side; “Monsters Under the Bed” has Yanya singing “Standing on the edge of reason/Not sure what’s right.”

      By the time she gets near the finish line, there’s a sense that she’s in a decidedly better place, admitting “All I really want is somebody to hold” in the dance-floor-ready “Tears”.

      “I kind of wrote a bunch of different songs and then put them together in an order that I felt made sense,” Yanya says. “The end goal is to just get there. I think it’s okay to not succeed, because, even if things don’t go as well as you hope, you can still enjoy your life. Having dark thoughts doesn’t necessarily make everything dark.”

      Those sound like the words of someone who’s genetically predisposed to seeing the good in everything, even on days when the sadness rolls in. Right from when she started taking piano as a kid, Yanya’s progressive parents instilled in her the idea that nothing brings people together like art—music being one of the most powerful unifying forces on the planet.

      So if Yanya’s on something of a mission—both with Artists in Transit and in her solo career—that’s hardly by accident.

      “There was always art around us when we were growing up, and I think that makes you look differently at the outside world,” she says. “Also, my dad’s from Istanbul, and my mom was brought up in London, but she’s Irish and Persian. Having that kind of heri­tage makes you really interested in finding similarities with others, instead of focusing on differences. You realize you really need to make connections to make sense of your own story.”

      Nilüfer Yanya opens for Sharon Van Etten at the Imperial on Friday (February 22).

      Nilüfer Yanya, "Baby Luv"

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