Sometimes I don’t really know who I am. What I mean by that is I stumble down the slope of memory recall until I’m staring into a void of past selves that feel like uncanny valley renditions of the Me that is Now. I find myself unable to work out if what I’m remembering actually happened or was just a recurring dream I had when I was 12. I’m bombarded by the endless versions of myself (past, present, future) coexisting in my psyche until it feels like none of them are real. These unsettling thoughts come when I think about it too hard. But yeule’s new album, Evangelic Girl is a Gun, wants me to sit with that discomfort.
Nat Ćmiel has been releasing music under yeule for over 10 years. They first dropped plenty of EPs, then some videogame soundtracks, followed by a succession of full-lengths, each LP more impressive and distinct than the last. 2019’s self-produced Serotonin II went videogame ambient, while follow-up Glitch Princess leaned into experimental electronica, influenced, in part, by a move to London for art school that helped yeule join the city’s PC Music scene. (“Too Dead Inside” was produced by Danny L Harle, and yeule opened for Charli XCX’s CRASH tour the same year.) yeule’s third album, softscars, saw them bring in grittier shoegaze and punk textures, creating an android-like, blown-out rock sound that augmented the record’s emotional depth. Visuals have remained a cornerstone of yeule’s ever-changing persona (their first foray into art was as a painter); whether going full manic pixie dream girl or deep underworld goth, yeule reaches into different layers of themself, contorting their image to bring something new to the forefront with each release.
Evangelic Girl is a Gun serves as a means of reflection, bringing all their different variants under one banner. yeule travels through personas, talking to their previous selves and reckoning with what lies at their core. It’s a record entrenched in emotional confrontation, with aesthetics that speak to the dark places within ourselves that we often opt to ignore. It’s a world of skulls, straitjackets, dirt bikes, full body chains, cyber sigilism, blood drinking, bone chewing, fangs, giant cats flying overhead, deep, brooding darks, and bright, blinding whites. It’s the depths of the underworld, and yeule guides us into a realm where identity splinters and then reforms.
A true child of the dot-com boom, yeule spent their childhood in Singapore finding solace from depression in niche corners of the web. They’ve thrived in anonymity, with their stage name coming from a Final Fantasy character (first serving as their screen name on sites like Tumblr and TERA). Nat Ćmiel, the name they go by colloquially, is an alias in itself (they first used the moniker to sign artwork in high school; “Ćmiel” comes from the Polish words for “moth” and “bumblebee”). They’ve thrown themself into a rabbit hole of AKAs, each time further obscuring the lines between personas. In a post announcing the record, yeule refers to this splitting of identities, saying, “I made a deal with an angel to immortalize the fragments of my heart falling away forever across light-years of voids cutting through blades of chromatic illuminations, these endless glaciers of me.”
These fragments and glaciers coexist on Evangelic Girl is a Gun, appearing in flashes but switching up before you even get a chance to get comfortable. On opener “Tequila Coma,” yeule references their aliases within the first verse: “Offline, I count them / All of the names that I choose.” Further into the bôa-meets-Portishead psych rock track is the first mention of a “she” that yeule refers back to throughout the album. “She’s dark and divine / Sacrificial lamb of mine” hints at a version of themself they’ve left behind in their transformation from conspicuous genre disruptor to experimental pop pioneer.
“The Girl Who Sold Her Face” mirrors an ethos found in songs like “Paparazzi”—portraying the extremes someone puts themselves through in the promise of fame. “I’ll drink blood and chew on bones,” yeule bargains through growling distortion. “And I will finally be a star.” Later, the perspective shifts: “She is picture perfect porcelain / Gone too fast again.” A dissociation occurs, with yeule branching off from these selves they’ve inhabited at different points in their life. It becomes clear that Evangelic Girl is a Gun exists across multiple planes of reality—the lived version, the remembered version, and the countless alts in-between.
These varied identities are rooted in yeule’s own varied inspirations, pulling from an array of identities/personas/existences they’ve held at different points in their life. The emotional glaciers that anchor Evangelic Girl are mirrored through the sonics. Whenever you think you have a grip on a song, it goes somewhere unexpected, or even deeper than you thought it could. There are blunt, anti-establishment themes—akin to My Chemical Romance’s “Teenagers”—on the deceptively stripped down “1967.” The song’s blunt hook, “I wish they didn’t draft boys / Boys who want to die,” serves as its inciting incident, where the vocals rupture and overload, and the acoustic backing turns poppy. On the title track, yeule serves up a three-movement electroclash magnum opus that kicks into a double-time EDM break before exploding in a frenzy of feedback. The songs feel simultaneously surreal and lucid, possessing sonic, lyrical, and narrative depth that exists in a liminal state, suspended between recognition and distortion.
Each song on Evangelic Girl is a Gun takes us deeper into yeule’s inner psyche, closer and closer to the glacier’s edge. Their identities get simultaneously blurrier and more distinct as we go. On “Eko,” we get flashes of an “unreal being… with eyes so full of pain” living in yeule’s head, set to a glitchy, early 2010s club beat. They refer to themself as “a real rabbit” in the raw acoustics of “VV,” describing it as a kind of past life (“I was a real rabbit / Before I was me”). On the glimmering “Dudu,” they’re an “unstable butterfly,” with dream-pop textures and a major key masking the story of someone tearing themselves apart emotionally—“Cut a line / Have a cry… Overdosed from the pain / Woke up in a bed, restrained / I screamed and screamed and / Screamed your name.”
By the time we get to “What3vr,” yeule approaches their toxic love with an air of nonchalance (the smooth 4/4, the whispery “da das,” the droney, half-asleep-yet-crystal-clear vocals) that suggests frustration beating out despair. Dulcet vocals return to the tinny, crinkly noise pop on “Saiko,” speaking to not just the mental and emotional turmoil yeule goes through for love, but their dreams of being pieced back together by the same person they’ve given everything to. “Saiko” is half-reality, half-imagination, ping-ponging between the fading clarity of dreams you just woke up from, and the blaring gut punches of memories warped beyond recognition.
Closer “Skullcrusher” continues to blur the lines between emotional static and waking life. Downtempo and death metal-adjacent, it comes just after the rush of manufactured euphoria seen in the title track. It comes to a painful but satisfying head: “All I want to do is love you / But all you want to be is in a dream,” yeule sings, closing the whole album. The anguish is both masked and amplified by the walls of fuzz and distortion and feedback, on the vocals themselves and the guitar runs and cymbal clashes. It serves as an unexpected yet effective closer, reflective of the entire record itself; echoing the turmoil and noise of the tangible versus the clarity and simplicity of incessant dissociation.
With Evangelic Girl is a Gun, yeule is determined to deconstruct their reality, moving forward as a post-human pop star. They use the record’s ten tracks to slip between forms, wielding a pop, metal, and EDM mixture that dives into splintered dimensions and liminal spaces. And after all of this confrontation—these repeated identity exorcisms—we’re left with the yeule of Now: a being pieced together from static and echoes, flickering at the seams, and more whole after every break.
