yune pinku Interview

“It’s a good year for Irish people,” DJ, producer and singer-songwriter yunè pinku says through glugs of Guinness. It’s Tuesday, later afternoon, and the two of us are sitting in a beer garden a few streets away from London Bridge station, perched beneath a rusty canopy that is sporadically dripping rainwater from an earlier erratic shower. 

The Malaysian-Irish 21-year-old is light-hearted and unassuming, seemingly as interested in me as I am in her. She also doesn’t take herself too seriously—her artist moniker, after all, is in part an ode to the legendary claymation penguin, Pingu. We’ve met before, briefly, at ESNS festival in Groningen, Holland; an event known for showcasing the next best European talent. That day, she was courted around at breakneck speed due to the eagerness of a large portion of the press in attendance vying to talk to her…myself included. She won an award at the festival’s cherished Music Moves Europe ceremony later that evening, which she graciously accepted “wearing a hoodie that had spaghetti stains all down it.” 

“I’m sick of talking about myself,” she laughs as we settle in and light a cigarette. Naturally, I then proceed to make her talk about herself. 

The mixed-heritage yunè articulates with a unique twang, a Metropolitan measure hidden amidst a Celtic cadence. At the core she’s a Londoner, having lived in and around the city her whole life; her first ever show was at Bermondsey Social Club, down the road from our current whereabouts. The melting pot of influence that the English capital offers has in part shaped her creative ethos: “I think exposure to different kinds of music growing up is something that feeds into my ideology of mixing things,” she says. “Little bits and bobs that unconsciously sink in.”

One thing that didn’t inspire her though, was electronic music; paradoxical given the sound of her garage-laden, glitchy hyper-pop-tinged discography. “I used to literally hate electronic music. I was like, ‘This is just noise!’ It was only from working in it that I realised there are loads of kinds of it.” Even now, she tends to steer clear of it in casual listening, with her taste leaning more towards alternative guitar-driven music, name-dropping Wolf Alice, Fontaines DC and Radiohead throughout our conversation. So, how is she so successful at making music of an electronic style? “I was initially making indie pop stuff,” she remembers casually, “and then I randomly just tried out garage. It randomly picked up from there and I was like, ‘Well, guess I'm that now.’”

In her youth, yunè never aspired to be a professional musician. She, in fact, strove towards a career in music journalism, much to our shared amusement. Making music was an outlet for a teenage yunè who was fascinated by sound, at first as an almost trivial game-like exercise done purely for personal gratification. “I was literally just mucking around,” she divulges. “It was more that I just enjoyed making something and then listening back to it. It started with soundscapes and all this stuff and then gradually the more familiar I got with it, the more I felt like I could do it. It’s a bit like Lego of the mind, to be honest, a stacking thing. But I don't know, I didn't really expect anything to come of it…but, yeah,” she beams awkwardly, “now we're here.”

Her initial impetus for uploading music to the internet, via Soundcloud, was to save storage on her phone. Out of the blue, her now-manager messaged her, liked her sound and wanted to help her promote it. “I thought it was a scam at first,” she jokes. “But then we had a few phone calls and decided to shop around a few of the best tracks towards the end of lockdown. I was finishing college and working in a pub for like a year, doing music at the same time. And then I signed a record deal. It felt very like divine intervention; there are millions of people on Soundcloud, but I got lucky.”

Freshly signed to artist development label Platoon, yunè shared her debut EP, “Bluff” in 2021. Comprised of four disorientating, dance-driven head-boppers, the project saw her emerge as a worthy and enigmatic new presence within the contemporary London electronic space. “I felt a lot more confident singing and experimenting,” she muses on her follow-up sophomore EP, 2023’s “BABYLON IX”. “I had more of a clear visual idea generally. It was the first batch of songs I made while working in music and it was the first time I'd made music with a whole team to bounce ideas off as well. We were all just on the complete same wavelength. It felt very organic.” 

The project in question is a texturally and thematically superior effort in comparison to the promising but somewhat one-dimensional debut. Inspired by cyber futurism, League of Legends and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, yunè’s second body of work has an unusual and memorable visual and conceptual identity. Sonically, it’s tasteful, otherworldly, jittery yet warm; a Grimesian Tumblr-era snapshot, a hazy tongue-in-cheek world that yunè's vocal – sometimes instrumental component, sometimes centric crux – floats through, ethereally dominant yet barely there. 

On “BABYLON IX”, yunè sounds more confident both in her singing and writing, factors that were augmented with conscious intent. “Lyric writing is probably my favourite part of making music,” she offers. “I think it's the part that’s most natural for me, that I don’t really need to think about. I write poetry as well and I feel like lyric writing and poetry are very similar. On the newer stuff. I've been trying to push myself to write with a clear meaning. It can allow me to connect with it more.”

Her comments surprise me. To the press and public, yunè has always been pitched as a polymathic presence, but first and foremost a producer and DJ rather than a singer-songwriter. “It’s been sold like it's that order, but I think realistically it's probably always been the reverse. I think writing has always been at the forefront of me; I don't think I'm a great producer. I can do enough for a demo, really, and then I work with other people to really oomph everything and make it delectable. Honestly, I’m too impatient for production sometimes. It just takes so long, that you're like, ‘I just want it to happen now’. I think I'm too scatterbrained for it.”

yunè is refreshingly humble and honest about her own capabilities. She’s currently in album mode, attempting to ameliorate the hype of her two incepting EPs with a more significant statement of intent. “I think I went into [making the album] really cocky and I was like, ‘I can do this in my sleep’, and then I actually tried to do it and was like, ‘Oh’,” she giggles, tucking into a fresh pint. “The main thing is trying to make a bunch of music that can fit in a project together because it's like double the amount of an EP. I think we're getting there slowly though.”

She at times feels lost amid the thankless velocity of being an artist, yet finds solace in her increased insight into her role within the musical hemisphere, slowly but surely finding her feet on the industry’s cobbled pathway. “I do get imposter syndrome a lot,” she admits. “Like the minute that I sit down to make a song and it doesn't immediately happen, I'm like, [gasps] ‘I’m a failure! I shouldn't be here!’ But at the same time, I know myself and I understand the industry a lot better than before working in it, and I have faith in audiences now. I think people are actually getting a lot more open-minded when it comes to music.”

The music industry, however, is notoriously difficult to navigate through as an artist, and yunè’s thoughts on its wider landscape are conflicted. “I think there's a lot of people with the right ideas but, post lockdown, the industry hasn't found itself again fully. TikTok has become a huge platform for music and you have to make these really false ‘organic’ moments happen online, where it feels like it's accidental but it's very intentional. I think [knowing] how to sell music has been made quite complicated. How do you sell music to a generation that hates being sold stuff?”

Performing live is part and parcel with her job; yunè, who never desired to be on stage and avoids raves as an attendee at all costs, now finds herself in front of hundreds of people on a regular basis. It’s been perhaps the biggest challenge she’s faced, but like seemingly everything else in her (so far short yet prosperous) tenure, she’s managed to spin her inherently introverted exterior to her advantage. “I’m the furthest thing from [a natural performer]. I think some people are literally born with it and then some people just figure it out on stage. For me, there's a weird pseudo privacy by being on my own [on stage]. I think my thing is just being moody and mysterious to hide the social anxiety.”

Whether she initially envisioned it or not, yunè’s star is on the rise. Her live sets have captivated audiences across the globe, with this summer yet to be her busiest to date. Despite not fully backing herself as a producer, she’s two-for-two with her EPs, has remixed Charli XCX, Biig Piig and Disclosure, and recently signed to cherished electronic record label Method 808, and shared a first single under its guidance, “Killing Bee”, last October. She has defied all odds – that are constructed in large by herself – to become one of the most exciting new-wave acts in the UK. 

“I don't really know to be honest,” she replies when I question her on the concept of infamy. “It's definitely not something that I ever wanted. With music, when you get really successful, fame is a subsidiary, you don't really get the option. For some reason I get a bit freaked out by fans because I just find it really strange that people know me as yunè pinku.”

An elusive and vital entity who epitomises the growing fearlessness of UK electronic music, yunè pinku finds herself, almost accidentally, poised for impact. What impact that is, lies with her. Ideas? “My biggest thing is bringing back a bit of rock’n’roll to music culture,” she affirms brazenly, draining her glass of black liquid until no foam remains. “I feel like it's so sanitised and everyone's on a detox and getting facials. I’m like, ‘Let's just be wrinkly and fucking worn down, smoke a million cigarettes and drinking all the beers.’” Rebellion against tepidity—I’m here for it.