It’s been 30 years since Portishead’s Dummy took home the Mercury Prize and cemented Bristol’s trip-hop underground, but its woozy turntablism echoes across the pop spectrum today: the pitch-shifted melancholy of Sky Ferreira, the bass-heavy brooding of a.s.o., the dreamy reverb of crushed. The juxtapositions and subversions that made the genre groundbreaking at its inception still have an obvious appeal. Trip-hop’s contrast of wistful vocals against steely, computerized rhythms is an easy aesthetic shorthand for nihilism, existentialism, and accelerationism. It’s theoretically perfect, in other words, for sighing deeply while reminiscing about “morphine kissing” and “acid tripping,” as yeule does on their fourth album, Evangelic Girl is a Gun.
yeule has wielded nostalgia as a weapon before: 2023’s softscars used the serrated edges of nu-metal and grunge to amplify their rage, and a year prior, Glitch Princess incorporated shades of mid-2000s indie folk into its complex digital circuitry. Much of yeule’s artistic output is preoccupied with dissociation and disconnection—rotting, maiming, and otherwise escaping the flesh. Their strongest songs use nostalgia to ground that disembodiment in the undeniably human: the strikingly simple strum of an acoustic guitar on “dazies,” a bloodcurdling scream on “x w x.” But on Evangelic Girl is a Gun, yeule deflates much of what created that productive tension; these songs offer disappointingly little to differentiate themselves from their already heavily referenced source material.
It’s not that Evangelic Girl is a Gun is a challenging listen—the slow, shuffling rhythms and bluesy basslines on “Tequila Coma” and “What3vr” will go down easy for fans of Moby and Massive Attack, while “VV” recalls the 2000s soft rock of Ingrid Michaelson and Natasha Bedingfield. With production from an illustrious group including A.G. Cook, Clams Casino, and Mura Masa, the album sounds technically sharp, filled with small flourishes—the click of a gun reloading on “Saiko,” the sound of a camera flash on “1967.” But it is, despite the suggestion of sex and violence in its marketing, ultimately tedious.
At 31 minutes, Evangelic Girl is a Gun is the shortest record yeule has released, but repetitive choices make it feel far longer. A stifling, slow-moving beat seems to carry the first two songs forward at a morphiated drip. Moments on “Eko” and “1967” that should feel climactic—repeating the song’s title as breakbeats ricochet, screaming about a lover going off to war—are lost in the background, competing against a small army of vocal filters. “Skullcrusher” is perhaps the worst offender, so numbingly loud and slow it almost sounds as if it were accidentally exported at half speed. There is no emotional anchor here like the onslaught of “dazies” on softscars, nor a moment of differentiation like the shocking vulnerability of “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty” on Glitch Princess. Despite its apparent intricacies, Evangelic Girl is a Gun feels oddly flat.
Maybe the album’s sameness would feel less glaring if the lyrics had more to offer than fatalistic bromides. On “The Girl Who Sold Her Face,” they stretch the opening lines—“Don’t go on your phone/Just pretend to be dead”—just a bit further than the melody naturally allows. It hangs awkwardly in the air before hitting the not-quite rhyme of “They said ‘Everyone loves you’/Yeah, them but not the feds.” Other songs, like “Saiko” and “Tequila Coma,” feel like B-sides from softscars, revisiting that album’s themes of self-destruction. This superficiality bottoms out at “Dudu,” which pairs lyrics that read like LiveJournal statuses—“Cut a line/Have a cry/Unstable butterfly”—with a maddeningly endless repetition of the titular phrase. It’s both too saccharine and too cynical, a nursery rhyme for the ketamine crowd.
For its flaws, Evangelic Girl is a Gun glimpses the potential for a new, more embodied sound from yeule: There is a levity in their voice here as they finally shake some of the heavy digital processing that earlier albums wielded like a cyborgian shield. But on their fourth album, yeule can’t help but be overwhelmed by the dense production that surrounds them, buckling under the immense weight of their inspirations.
