Nilfer Yanya's Infinite Melodies

“A straightforward message is not interesting for me,” says Nilüfer Yanya, calling from her home in east London.Yanya punctuates her sentences with her bright laugh or an introspective hmmm and shades in her remarks with a running metacommentary.

“I get inspired writing about something that’s a bit less clear.” My Method Actor – Yanya’s third album, released this month – makes good on her belief that the strongest ideas often exist in the in-between.A rumination on slippery but intriguing themes, including memory and nostalgia, the album sees her develop her rich style of storytelling.

While it’s easy to let Nilüfer Yanya’s latest single, “Like I Say (I Runaway),” play on repeat, and to get lost in the hum of the six-string, the low rasp in Yanya’s voice, the kick drum keeping a metronome’s steady beat, the vulnerability in her verses draws the listener into the present moment: “The minute I’m not in control, I’m tearing up inside,” she sings, a fitting admission for an artist who is self-professedly nervous to let others take the reins.The daughter of two visual artists, Yanya learned classical piano at school in London before falling in love with the electric guitar through her older sister’s favorite bands – the Strokes, Bloc Party, the Cure, the Pixies.

Inspired, she picked the instrument up at age 12.She would go on to practice with the Invisible’s Dave Okumu and record her first songs in a studio built by her uncle, music producer Joe Dworniak.

Those demos, uploaded to SoundCloud in 2014, laid bare her post-punk influences, layering her falsetto and gravelly, low register over reverb-heavy minor chords.At 20, Yanya was on the shortlist for a girl group planned by One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson, but she declined to participate so that she could focus on her own music (a wise choice: the project sputtered out after a year).

Between 2016 and 2018, she released a series of EPs on the Blue Flowers labe...