As a whole, Nilüfer Yanya’s third album asks questions with no easy answers. It is a supple, expansive body of work that peers into the crevices of life, exploring them with comforting strings, skittering beats, soul-tinged melodies and swooning harmonies.

While writing »My Method Actor«, Nilüfer retreated into the studio with her creative partner, Wilma Archer (Sudan Archives/MF Doom/Celeste). She had toured her second album, for a year and entered a period of transition, between albums, between record companies, between homes. »My Method Actor« deals a lot with the idea of movement from one part of life and into another. The seeds were planted in early 2023, but it wasn’t until the spring of that year that shoots began to appear. As songs started to form, Yanya and Archer squirreled themselves away from the world.

Songs bloomed into being in unexpected ways helping Yanya make sense of her world and the ways it’s changing as she enters her late twenties and grapples with what it means to be an established musician. “For me, writing is definitely problem solving - in the way they say that dreaming is like problem solving. You're like, oh, that sounds good. That looks good. That makes sense. But you don't really know why. You're kind of using that part of your creative brain that doesn't have to make sense.” Her lyrics are specific and hazy at once, and sometimes surreal: she talks about the songs as though she’s trying to decipher the person she was when she wrote them.