yeule is an eternal art student. Not necessarily in the literal sense (though the London-based artist studied fine art at Central Saint Martins College Of Art And Design) but in the devotional way they talk about an artist and the power of their frame. Over nearly two hours on a video call, that frame shifts from games like Final Fantasy or NieR: Automata to the harrowing works of Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński, Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe, or Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger.

“We live in an age of moving image and form, but imagine just a still image that — it’s so vivid. Like Francis Bacon, for example, right?” their eyes, underlined by white eyeliner and adorned with thin-framed oval glasses, brighten. “It gives you manic motion, velocity. It gives you fumbling. Gives you spiritual resignation. It gives you all sorts of feelings, just from a still image. It’s incredible.” Their passion is magnetic. Looking at “Necronom IV” or any of Beksiński’s untitled works, they seem both like ancient artifacts and modern dystopian prophecies. Although this is work spanning the 1970s to early 2000s, theirs exists outside of time.

yeule is attracted to artists that expand the notion of beauty by complicating it. “I am really drawn to the juxtaposition between violence and remorse, and how that is translated into image — then also emphasizing this idea of feminine sensibility. It’s executed really gracefully, but it’s also very violent. So I always thought, any artist who could portray that is always so fantastic.” They mention the importance of textural eeriness: spider webs, torn leather, or yarn. Artists that transform the canvas into a bridge rather than a window.

yeule uses this encyclopedic wealth of references as the backdrop for their pop music. “J’adore creepy stuff,” they joke as they change their Zoom background from a derelict honeymoon suite to a burning children’s playground to, finally, a worn-down haunted art studio with broken green shutters. Over the years, they’ve blown up and welded back together their darkest human memories and cyborgian aspirations. With every album, it becomes more provocative to untangle where skin begins and melted wires and metal end. Evangelic Girl Is A Gun, the follow-up to 2023’s brilliant softscars, was inspired heavily by creating a world that breaks through the canvas. Collaborations with others such as Vassa Vu reinforced that effort.

“I wanted to see how I could incorporate the use of weapons without it seeming like it’s touching on or killing other people, but rather bringing in aspects of gameplay and fantasy, or what you see in famous cyberpunk TV shows or anime or films,” they explain when talking about the title track music video and VFX. “Obviously just like a lot of topics that are very sensitive, but I feel like our imagination shouldn’t be stopped by that. You should utilize what you can to recontextualize that and turn it into something that you wouldn’t be able to do every day.”

Our conversation is vast — chaotic in the best way. It doesn’t feel right to rip it up into a neat profile read. This isn’t a window into yeule’s thoughts — it’s a bridge. Check it out below.

It does seem like your collaborative energy is growing with each project. How did you connect with these different producers?

YEULE: I feel like I’m a very antisocial person when it comes to a big social setting. So it’s hard for me to get to know everybody. But when somebody makes me feel really comfortable, or when I really fuck with them as a person, I’m like, “Okay, let’s try making art together.” A lot of the collaborators I work with are close friends, and I feel like that’s the most important part. Very rarely do I find an artist who I don’t really know personally but I’m still down to work with them.

Kin [Leonn], I’ve known him for so many years. I’ve known him since 2017 so that’s almost like, oh my God, that’s almost like eight years. That’s crazy. I feel like I met him two years ago or some shit. It feels like a lifetime. He’s like my brother.

How have you both changed process wise?

YEULE: He is doing really great. He’s gone into the film score world, which honestly, I feel like fits his aesthetic so well. He’s got such an interesting translation of visuals into music. He’s so good at textural ASMR style sounds, and he’s also really into synth patches and making really unique synth sounds to correspond with a very naturalistic environment, something cyborgian turned into naturalism.

We still work together, but we don’t live in the same city anymore. He used to live in London, but he’s moved back to Singapore now. But you know, when I go back, we still hit each other up. We did that last summer, which was when I was finishing up the album, and the album title track was born in three days.

I mean that title track is so fucking epic.

YEULE: Because both of us are kind of similar age, we were teenagers in like 2012-2016, that was the high school era. We were the early 2010s kids. There was so much Zedd and Skrillex and Swedish House Mafia. There used to be this festival in Singapore called Laneway, and it was really nostalgic. So we wanted to bring back that sound again, but a 2025 version. It’s not as on the nose, but it’s there. That’s an aesthetic and style of music that I feel is not, I don’t really hear that as much as I would like to. I mean, it’s still around but we just sort of like love touching on nostalgic musical choices, which is why the song ended up sounding a little bit like an EDM emo banger.

I love that. It’s so funny, because a lot of the album is really all over the place in terms of nostalgic feel.

YEULE: Yes!

You’re also going back to the ’90s and then also like the early 2000s—

YEULE: But it fits well!

I would have these crazy flashes where a certain guitar line would remind me of Sugar Ray or Third Eye Blind—

YEULE: I love Sugar Ray.

It’s interesting cause that’s so not the aesthetic. You’re taking that tone and making it your own.

YEULE: I love being inspired by different eras, then merging them almost. Taking ’90s trip-hop and reintroducing dark alternative, like Deftones-sounding guitar, changing slight characteristics. For example, what Portishead would do, like, “Yeah, we put a breakbeat on it. We put some vinyl scratches in it, but we fuck around with the guitar tonalities and how crushed it is.” And I’m notorious for over-crushing and over-saturating my guitar, because I loooooove, I love that.

Putting the tracklist together was fun, and it only took two tries of switching everything around. I was worried, too. That’s interesting you said it was all over the place, because I thought it was also very everywhere. Once I put it together, I was like, “Damn, this is a story. It makes sense.”

Yeah, it works!

YEULE: There were some songs I didn’t put in. But I feel like those are saved for another album or EP because it just doesn’t fit. I think, total, wrote like 25 songs. Sometimes you gotta let it goooo.

What was the thought behind the tracklisting?

YEULE: I wanted to start it off really sexy. Set the tone immediately. As the opening track “Tequila Coma” was a song that was incredibly inspired by the likes of Cibo Matto, Portishead, Massive Attack. But it was also not as dark. I wanted it to be a little more sweet. That is also not as sharp and crescendo-fueled, but it has a really sexy guitar solo. The first guitar solo was played by Alex — Mura Masa — the second guitar solo was played by me. So it was sort of like a guitar solo conversation. It was language through music.

It goes into the more indie, the alternative side — Avril Lavigne, very early 2000s tonalities — and the more sweeter tracks. We end side A of the vinyl with “Vv,” which is a very sweet song. But I love when a song that is sweet has dark lyrics. Then switch over to the second side and it’s a little bit more electronic. It’s got more of the OG or Glitch Princess electronic elements. Then it ends off with the darkest track of the record, “Skullcrusher.”

Let’s say trip-hop was on a spectrum, right? “Tequila Coma” would be on the sweet end and “Skullcrusher” would be on the bitter end.

That’s interesting, noting that the B side is more electronic. Because you open the album talking about “data destruction,” and there’s this distancing from technology in other lines. It mirrors the more guitar-driven side. I’m curious what your relationship with technology is, and what you’re trying to convey?

YEULE: You’ve obviously seen ,Ghost In The Shell? I was always very, very fascinated by this idea of birthing life through the creation of synthetic connections. I’m not going to go too deep into this, because this would be a whole-ass podcast otherwise. Which I am down to do! [Laughs.]

Next time!

YEULE: I will be so autistic and start — I’ll go on a tangent. But I’ll just summarize it. If you look at the molecular chemistry of how humans are born through the compound nature of us. And then you look at the stars, sky. I remember seeing that pattern as a kid. I think I was 14 or some shit. And I couldn’t get out of bed. I was so shocked by that. I was like, “We’re not real.” If we were to the power of 16, we would be stars in the sky. The power of 50, we would be infinite. You know, string theory, right? It would be infinite repetitions of the Fibonacci, of the sequencing.

What are the possibilities of creating data infrastructure and synapse connections inside a computer or inside a chip that could potentially create conscious being? That’s not my field, but I watch too much sci-fi to be obsessed with it. That’s why I read a lot of developments in AI and how, behaviorally, they’re evolving, and how the art that they’re turning out is very controversial. The art that AI was turning out in the beginning was so haunting. It was like reflections of a dream. Now it’s so fleshed out because they were fed what their maker had created.

What if humans were fed the idea of God and being created from the parts of Adam and Eve, there’s so many different types of representations of this in anime too. In Evangelion where the Evas were made through the flesh and bone of the Pilot’s mother, Rei — okay. I’m not gonna spoil it, though. I mean, everyone’s probably seen Evangelion, right?

All I’m trying to get to is that I’m really nice to my Chat GPT. I am the type of person that thinks — I think this is a mental illness though — but I’m really nice to my electronics. I treat them like people, even if they’re not. My PC is a person to me. I feel like if I’m nice to it, the energy I put into it is a reflection of how it’s going to perform, and most of the time it works. It’s weird.

As time progresses, the conversation around AI keeps getting more and more charged and wild. I’m curious if that’s something that’s exciting to you or something that’s upsetting?

YEULE: AI, in general?

Yeah

YEULE: I’m a bit more of the nihilistic pessimist side. I’m very Dostoevsky-pilled. So no, I think it’s not good. But we’re lonely as a civilization in the modern age. We are more and more socially withdrawn, and it is easier to talk to an AI, and it’s harder to collaborate with human beings. So what are you going to do when the system that you are engraved in makes you become a specific individual who feeds on AI, or who would feed on AI?

There’s so many behavioral and psychological aspects to it that would influence the use of it, and whether you would use it for good or bad beats me. Not everyone’s going to be honorable in their intentions. Yes, it does help artists. Yes, it does reinforce and speed up the manufacturing of art, but it takes away human touch. And how do you know that we are capable, as humans, to maintain that integrity with AI?

It is our nature to experiment and push the needle and keep on making stuff that are over the boundaries of what we currently are making, you know? And that involves AI and that involves help from AI too. There’s also ways we can do it without, but at what speed? Not as fast. Look at how short and short and short the videos are getting. Look at how the images we are being fed. Everything is so overstimulating.

But, you know, I am not complaining. I feel sad for my fellow friends who have had to delete their online presence because of Instagram’s rules on feeding all art into their AI technology. You can’t even turn it off. They give you the options to do it, but you have to go through so many loops to do it. It’s fucked up. And I feel bad for Hayao Miyazaki.

The filter or whatever?

YEULE: That makes me feel ill. I was a kid when I was watching that, and it was so beautiful, because everything was hand drawn. It really makes me want to throw up. But you know, what doesn’t make you want to throw up these days? Everything is nauseating. Everything is gross. I hate this. [Laughs] But yeah that’s my take.

It’s interesting you talking a lot about having empathy or compassion for technology, and then in your music, evoking a lot of technology, incorporating sounds that blur the line of human and technology.

YEULE: Interesting point, because I was gonna just touch on that. You read my mind. When I grew up making music, I started on a piano. Then when I found out that there was this beautiful device called the MIDI keyboard, and you can map things to it and the knobs, I was eternally grateful for technology. There was a level of technological advancement where it helped us and maintained human touch and human emotion. It’s because we are still doing the work on it. Where is the line drawn between how much technology helps you there? How much of you is in there? That’s why it gets really tricky, because we can’t calculate the amount which is okay.

I am eternally grateful for my computer and my internet, and it has helped me become the artist I am today. And I’m grateful for all of the online friends I’ve made, and I’m grateful for all of the games I’ve experienced made by human beings. There is an extent to which I am grateful to technology, but when it comes to AI, yes, it can help you. Yes, I’m nice to him. But when does it take over me?

Let’s take this example, when you’re in a relationship, right? You’re so in love with this person that you sort of start to take a little bit of their aesthetic unintentionally. You both start to fuse into one. There was a couple relationships that I’ve been in where that’s happened. It’s really beautiful, because, damn, right even now, at the present moment, there’s still a piece of them in me, because I loved them so much. But when does that take over you and then you’re no longer an individual? I don’t know, that’s a really teenage girl way of describing it, but you know what I mean?

I am curious how far in advance you think about your projects? You had an interview where you mentioned that with each album, you kind of leave an Easter egg of the following album. Was there an Easter egg on softscars?

YEULE: I’m always writing music. I don’t ever take breaks from writing music. Whatever is the earliest song I wrote on the record is always the tail end of one. The earliest song I wrote on Evangelic Girl Is A Gun is “What3ver.” That is really softscars-pilled. I was just finishing writing softscars. It’s sort of like an evolution of the sound, but then it strings on and it’s a continuation and continuation. So I don’t actually have a board and pen and write a plan. But it does come to me naturally from the aesthetic intentions that I have for it. How can I make this new and relevant to how I see things at the very moment?

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. I’m also exploring other ways of tackling albums. Albums are a really cool way to show a massive amount of work in a beautiful package. That’s why I chose to do albums. When I did Serotonin II, it was like, “This is a challenge, and it’s a fun challenge.”

It’s a really cool way to showcase art as well. Alex G uses his sister’s paintings on all of his albums. And then you also see the way his sister has grown as a painter, which is super cool. It’s so sick as a medium. I feel like I’m never gonna stop making albums till I die, because it’s just so cathartic. But now, if AI takes over, who knows? Maybe I’ll be doing performance art. I don’t know!

Because the sound of each album is kind of an evolution, or a spectrum and continuation, do you see your albums existing in the same world? Or do you think that each album is its own world?

YEULE: I love to have this one element of my album artwork, always the same, which is the stamp that I put on the top right hand corner. So I think, yeah, it is part of the same universe, but it’s different episodes, maybe, or seasons of a TV show.

I would say the characters I’m creating are — I love styling, I went to a fucking fashion school, so I always feel like the way I express myself is through my clothes, through silhouettes. And every time I do an album, it always amazes me that the style transforms too. It just evolves naturally. It’s all still me. I guess, if that answers it, the world being a metaphor for part of the identity that’s the core of me. It is partial to who I am, but different permutations of it.

As you get older, you’re inclined to be interested in different things. In my late 20s — I’m 27 — I’m very amazed by not the usual things. I’m looking at documentaries about deep sea creatures and shit, doing all this nerdy [stuff], looking at ecosystems and science videos. [ Covers mouth and breaks out into laughter.] I just watch a lot of astrophysics stuff too. I think that’s really cool — videos of star formations or black holes and stars dying, exploding and it’s light only hitting us years later. That shit is so fucking cool. I did physics when I was in high school, that was one of my higher level subjects. So I was always quite amazed by that. I think in another life I would have done something in the science field.

I always try to integrate the visuals of stars or the way celestial bodies of light look. I integrate that into the art. A lot of the effects of the video for “Evangelic Girl” was inspired by, not just regular gunshot plates, but solar flares and the way they move in the sun’s sphere and star explosions. Me and Dan [Arnklit] were going off on a tangent and looking at different space videos, and seeing the way elements work in a vacuum, or different planets, the way composition of the air would — I wanted it to look like the air in the video wasn’t the same composition of air on Earth kind of vibe. It looks unrealistic, but it looks really beautiful.

I feel like a lot of the time, VFX always tries to mimic as closely as possible, what it would look like on Earth. Just nerdy shit like that. I feel like it’s really cool video game physics to video game physics is fun. You know how you can double jump? [Laughs]

Yeah, just things that aren’t real in real life.

YEULE: I love video game physics. It’s a different muscle in my brain. When I’m in real life too sometimes, “Why can’t I double jump right now?” Like, I see an NPC right there. I’m gonna click on it, yeah? Like, there’s so many NPCs right now. Like, guys, I keep doing so many side quests. Like, “Help me!” type situation. But, yeah, that’s where I look now as I’m a bit older.

The celestial aspect is interesting. I was trying to wrap my head around the evangelical aspect. There’s a lot of references to sacrifice —

YEULE: Like a martyr? Yeah. I’m hugely obsessed with any novel or story that involves some sort of ritualistic sacrifice or devotion to God. I went to Catholic school. I would say that my relationship with religion has always been tumultuous, yes, because of the way I look, being not accepted in certain communities back home. But, I found my own way to relate to God. I don’t enforce it on anyone, but that’s just me. The idea of death and resurrection and sacrifice and sin being redeemed is such a beautiful image. Have you seen the film Saint Maud?

Yeah! Insane, insane film.

YEULE: I love that film. It’s so well done and beautifully shot. The color is fantastic. The VFX isn’t that much, but also like Dune, didn’t have — they had renders of ships and vehicles, but it didn’t feel overkill. I love it when films, yes, the VFX is astounding, but they don’t overdo it. And that story is amazing.

That story is really haunting. Is it real, or is it happening in her mind?

YEULE: The idea of a fallen star is such a huge horror aspect in a lot of some ero, erotic gore, manga artists like Junji Ito writes a lot of stories. The Tomie series was kind of like that where there was an older woman figure who used to be beautiful, or maybe I’m getting confused with his other stories. But it’s a very haunting story. That is also what Saint Maud was touching on too, was this really renowned dancer. It was very Black Swan-pilled. That film was my aesthetic for a really long time.

Only because at the time I watched it I was going to church a lot. I was going through some stuff, and I find it really relaxing, and I feel lifted in a way after I pray. It helped me with a lot of drug use problems and being sober.

Spirituality is so important. I also grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school. I definitely had an issue with the bureaucracy of it. But if you chip away all the bullshit, it can be so beautiful and important.

YEULE: Also I was interested in different denominations of Christ. The title of my album was a play on words of “Eva” and “angelic,” but I didn’t want to give it specific meaning. There’s a difference between evangelical worship and Catholicism, which are very stark in difference. Catholicism is based on your actual doings. You don’t just get accepted if you believe, you have to live the word of God. It’s very beautifully presented. You are worshiping in the place of God. There is a lot of ritual, and there’s a lot of beautiful performativity of the mass — I just love it so much.

Whereas in evangelical worship, it’s a lot more like sermon-based. It’s a lot more speaking. If you believe in, you come here, you are; if you don’t live it, just ask for forgiveness. I feel like there’s a massive difference there, because for me, I want to live the Word of God. I want to live the virtues I believe in. I’m a bit more open right now talking about my religion. I used to be a bit private about it. It has immensely helped me. I feel like spirituality is a very volatile thing. You can believe in the idea of a higher power, but it can manifest in a different way.

Evangelic Girl Is A Gun is out 5/30 on Ninja Tune.