Arriving a little over a year after 2022’s critically acclaimed Glitch Princess, Yeule’s third full-length album is their loudest and most immediately satisfying. Pulling effortlessly from ‘90s rock and shoegaze, softscars is less a departure in sound than in disposition; the record’s greatest revelations come in the sound of an artist facing themself and reclaiming their sense of human identity.
Yeule’s early work was unique in the way it played with space. Their first album, Serotonin II positioned them somewhere between the euphoric drama of Porter Robinson’s Worlds and the emphasis on texture over lyricism of Grimes’ Visions. Their synth-forward sound evoked science fiction fantasies while their lyrics expressed the dynamics of internet obsession, digital relationships, and dissociation with reality.
With the help of producer Danny L. Harle, their breakthrough record, Glitch Princess, introduced more dynamic songs with more direct lyricism. Looking back, Glitch Princess is a sonically unsettled record whose genre experiments were effective individually if inconsistent as an album. Still, Yeule showcased their sharpened song writing by moving away from the more oblique lyrics of Serotonin II and some of its scattershot sonic experiments hinted at the moves Yeule makes on softscars.
Yeule has been experimenting with acoustic sounds and guitar for a while now, with covers of folk musicians Adrianne Lenker and Haley Heynderickx predating the release of Glitch Princess. Glitch Princess also saw their first attempt at bridging these sounds with “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty,” where pitch-shifted vocals revolve around a grounding line of a strumming guitar; it is a standout on that record. softscars, across its 12 songs and 40 minutes, attempts to fully explore how rock music intersects with Yeule’s particularly digital sound.
Emphasizing this shift in sonic focus, Yeule opens softscars with a full-blown punk banger, enhanced with uncharacteristically filter-less vocals. Singing through clenched teeth, Yeule belts out the thematic components of softscars, contrasting flesh and bone and the human and robotic: “God created man, motherboard, wires and/Blood, bones, flesh, breathing, suicide engineering.” For an artist who notably self-described as a “cyborg entity,” this reckoning with the corporeal self proves existential, subverting the dissociative conceit on which much of Yeule’s prior music is built.
Later, on the title track, Yeule addresses their fleshy form as a separate entity and describes it with wet and saccharine images of honey fusing with gore. Instrumentally, the song exhibits less of a rock influence compared to the rest of the album. Despite a spindly, reverbed guitar in the background, “softscars” is notably beat-driven, glitchy, and propped up by fluorescent synth keys. That softscars’s most electro-pop moment happens to be its most lyrically direct about offline identity seems the point; the tension between digital and organic, cyborg and human, is built into the music.
This contrast is mirrored in the relatively barren and stripped-down “software update,” a song that one could recognize even if covered on an acoustic guitar which is a rare aspect in Yeule’s oeuvre. “I’m inside your phone/Personality built on your screen, too,” Yeule sings from the perspective of their cyborg-self. The lyrics reach for the comfort of the computer while a fuzzed-out guitar firmly pushes back.
It is this density of lyrical and sonic contrast that makes softscars such a rewarding listen. While the prominence of guitar may seem like a major departure in sound, the record stays true to the ways Yeule has always played with space and ambient noise. Moreso, softscars represents the arrival of a less resigned artist, less interested in constructing fantasy, as they start to explore whatever truth may lie at the intersection of on- and offline identity. “My body, mine/Nobody, mine/I have one name” they sing on “aphex twin flame.” Accompanied by live drums, guitar, and a synthesizer which resembles whistles of wind, they square both their disparate sounds and identities. A Yeule release used to indicate the destruction of an “era of [their] identity.” Now, Yeule is doing the opposite; softscars is the beginning of acceptance.
Finnegan Bly is the Assistant Arts and Culture Editor for The Triton.
Correction: This article was updated at 2:45 p.m. on October 24 to add credits.