yeule — the Singapore-born experimental pop project of Nat Ćmiel — closed out 2020 with a surprise. Dropped unannounced on New Year’s Eve via Bayonet Records, My Name is Nat Ćmiel is a single, one-track statement that marks the exact moment her sound pivoted from the dream-pop of 2019’s Serotonin II towards the glitch-heavy, IDM-leaning textures that dominate these two and a half minutes.
Where Serotonin II wrapped its melancholia in shoegaze guitars and soft-focus production, My Name is Nat Ćmiel is drastically, almost confrontationally bare. A handful of piano chords, airless and unresolved, sit beneath Ćmiel’s voice, which is pushed right to the front of the mix and left unadorned for much of the track — raw, explicit and intimately fragile, every breath audible. It’s the glitches that give it away as a pivot rather than a retreat: stuttering digital artefacts, granular crackle and restless IDM-style noise creep around the edges of the piano, small machines disturbing a very human moment. The title reads as an introduction — Ćmiel signing her own name at full volume for the first time — and the effect is quietly startling.
My Name is Nat Ćmiel marked yeule's pivot toward bare piano, stuttering glitches and an unadorned voice.
As a standalone statement, My Name is Nat Ćmiel is audacious in its restraint — an out-of-character, ambient-fragile pop song released into the chaos of a pandemic New Year with no fanfare and no follow-up. As a departure, it’s audacious: the vulnerability and the noise finally allowed to share the same room. The piano is gorgeous, the crackle is unnerving, and Ćmiel’s voice — at its most exposed — carries the whole thing on pure conviction.
Two minutes and fifty-three seconds that redraw the map: the sound of an artist naming herself, and of a chapter ending mid-sentence. It is the quietest moment she has ever released — and its restraint is its own kind of boldness.
