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The Sounding Board

Yeule's out for summer

A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.

Evangelic Girl is a Gun

Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. We’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely under-heard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.

Yeule couldn’t have timed the release of their new album any better.1

That’s not because any of Evangelic Girl is a Gun ‘s 10 tracks radiate Song of the Summer potential.2 Pop instincts are on display, but so too is a predilection for weird noise. There also isn’t anything about the fourth album from Singaproean artist Nat Ćmiel’s mononymous musical alter ego that specifically evokes the warmer months. Some of its glitch-touched dream pop can put you into the snug blissful surrender state that presages an open-window nap on a summer afternoon. But that’s only a sometimes thing with Evangelic Girl is a Gun, which also indulges some wonderfully jarring impulses.

Instead, the album’s May 30 release date feels fated because it coincides with two wildly different celebrations that nevertheless speak to aspects of both yeule and their new album that are worthy of notice and adulation.

The first of those celebrations is obvious — June is Pride Month and yeule’s music is the work of a queer artist. Ćmiel is a self-described “Glitch Princess” and nonbinary. That’s central to the image and sound of yeule. who fits the adroit, artful and androgynous trope established by acclaimed aliens and androids (David Bowie and Janelle Monáe).3 June is a month to celebrate LGBTQ+ people, communities, arts, culture and history. It’s fun that a good, relevant album was released as May gave way to June. I don’t expect Evangelic Girl is a Gun with its occasionally gritty guitar tones and cannibalistic lyrics to benefit from rainbow capitalism, but the world would be a cooler place if corporate tokenism could line up behind the pleasant drone of the languid and libidinal “What3ver.”

The other coincidence is a longer walk. About a week before Evangelic Girl is a Gun came out, Demon Days, the appropriately beloved second album from the cartoon rock band Gorillaz, celebrated its 20th anniversary.4 As people reckon with that album’s landmark status and wonder about the long-term influence of Damon Albarn’s lore-heavy side project, they should look no further than yeule and their new album as an example of an artist actively working within a similar milieu musically and conceptually.

Gorillaz, famously, aren’t a real band. They’re a revolving cast of real-life musicians led by former Blur front man Albarn who give voice to virtual characters created by Tank Girl artist Jamie Hewlett.5 Yeule, similarly, is a virtual construct and an aesthetic exercise.6 Like Gorillaz, yeule’s album cover’s tend to feature striking digital depictions rather than an accurate portrait of the person making music happen behind the scenes. Ćmiel is much closer in appearance and spirit, to yeule than Albarn is to his cartoon counterpart, but no one looks exactly like the being on the cover of Glitch Princess.

That album’s uncanny valley cover speaks directly to the world it’s music inhabits. Evangelic Girl is a Gun’s stark, nearly industrial cover image similarly informs the album’s content, too. Its filmic quality is in step with an album that features more analog instrumentation than past yeule LPs, contrast-heavy grayscale coloring channels the goth music that influences the album’s sound, the comically large gun yeule is holding hints at a vein of volatility that runs through the album and the small square symbol in the upper-right Forging a connection between visual presentation and music is an important part of yeule’s process.7 It’s an approach that’s more connected to reality than the literal comic book world of Gorillaz, but both projects place an emphasis on using visual cues to deepen musical storytelling.

But it’s sonic connections between Demon Days and Evangelic Girl is a Gun that are more evident.

Evangelic Girl is a Gun blends hypnagogic singing; poetic, sometimes profane, lyrics; and music that heavily incorporates elements of ’90s alternative music and both hip- and trip-hop. That’s a description that could aptly be applied to Gorillaz. There’s a patina of glitched-out noise experimentation to yeule’s music, yet there isn’t a world of difference between something like their song “Dudu” and “El Mañana” by Gorillaz. However, instead of guest verses from rap legends, yeule picks up interesting textures from guest producers, like A.G. Cook and Clams Casino. Also, while Albarn’s musical sensibilities serve as Gorillaz’s compass, yeule’s latest is built on a foundation poured by the likes of Shirley Manson, Tori Amos, Bjork and Beth Gibbons.

It’s a sound that echoes the past without being beholden to it and that stays true to the distortion-heavy consistently off-kilter sound that’s all yeule’s. It’s music that is sometimes exuberantly bright and other times placidly staid, but the first impression is never the full story. Weird electronic squelches, abrasive feedback, hissing static, corrosive guitar and chopped-up percussion sounds have a habit of popping up in unexpected places. If the Cardigans ever made a song that featured a brief bridge sung by Poo-Chi, the toy robot dog from the early ’00s, it would sound a lot like “Eko.” Album-opener “Tequila Coma” sounds like it could have been on Fiona Apple’s Tidal, if it wasn’t for a stuttering back beat and the presence of serrated guitar squeal in the place where an unfortunate snake charming outro would have appeared 30 years ago.

On Evangelic Girl is a Gun, There’s always something darker or more complex churning its way from the depths, ready to burst to the song’s surface and emanate oddball ripples. You never know when it’s going to arrive, but you can be sure it’s coming up. It’s coming up. It’s coming up.

  1. Yeule is generally stylized with all-lowercase letters. I’m going to abide by that when it doesn’t start a sentence. ↩︎
  2. I’m thrilled to note that, per Vox, the Song of the Summer concept predates the Billboard Hot 100— and some Western states. ↩︎
  3. Yeule’s music was also a part of the awesome I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack. Despite being The Departed levels of blunt with its symbolism, I Saw the TV Glow still generated hundreds of “ending explained” pieces with its queer coding. ↩︎
  4. “About a week” because Demon Days predates global release dates. It was released on Tuesday, May 24, 2025, stateside, but a day earlier in the UK and 11 days earlier in Japan. ↩︎
  5. 2-D, Murdoc Niccals, Noodle and Russel Hobbs comprise the virtual band. ↩︎
  6. Yeule might have the most thorough and thought-provoking “About” website section I’ve seen in a long time. ↩︎
  7. Per a recent Stereogum interview, “I plan the visual world first, and then I do the sonic world. That’s really helpful for me, because I’m a very, very visual person.” ↩︎