On Evangelic Girl is a Gun, yeule turns inward and fragments. What emerges is not clarity, but a mirror shattered just enough to suggest a face. Thirty-one minutes long and colder than anything they have made before, this fourth full-length drifts between forms – electroclash, trip-hop, dream-pop, industrial – without settling into any. It is an album of porous selves, whispering like a diary left open in the rain.
Where 2023’s softscars seethed in guitar feedback and self-laceration, Evangelic Girl is a Gun is more emotionally ineffable, more ghostlike than wounded. A move to Ninja Tune seems to have cleared space for this shift. Nat Ćmiel’s vocals are stripped of their usual synthetic lacquer; on several tracks, her voice hovers – dry, plaintive, unprocessed – no longer hiding behind glitch, but not quite stepping into the light.
The opener, ‘Tequila Coma’, eases the listener in with woozy, downtempo trip-hop. Everything is hushed: a skeletal beat, a murmured hook, guitar chords left hanging in fog. That detachment becomes a motif. ‘The Girl Who Sold Her Face’ hums with broken glamour – fame as disappearance, beauty as bargaining chip. “Don’t go on your phone / Just pretend to be dead,” yeule sings, almost tenderly.
‘Eko’, the first single released off the album, is sweet, dreamy, and kaleidoscopic. Glittering synths pulse beneath a breathy, intimate vocal line – but even here, something feels remote – this is pop fraying with its wires exposed. Elsewhere, the tone hardens. On ‘Evangelic Girl is a Gun’, the record’s centrepiece, yeule unleashes something closer to a ritual than a song. The structure, volatile yet precise, crumbles into a three-part spiral of industrial noise, club breaks, and feedback loops..
As a whole, the album moves like a collection of apparitions. ‘1967’ drifts in on acoustic strumming before unraveling into distortion and war-memory hallucination. “I wish they didn’t draft boys / Boys who want to die,” yeule sings, their voice flickering under layers of digital erosion. ‘Skullcrusher’, the closer, pushes this to a final collapse: shoegaze crumbling into metal, form giving way to noise.
There is a physicality to the album that feels new. Ćmiel has spoken about recording directly from amps and live takes, eschewing the heavily digitised polish of earlier work.
‘VV’ and ‘Dudu’ tread very lightly, their hooks pretty but untroubled. They seem to float beside the album rather than through it. But even in its thinner moments, Evangelic Girl is a Gun retains a strange coherence – less a narrative, more a constellation of moods circling a center that never quite reveals itself.
Evangelic Girl is a Gun is the sound of someone looking at themselves through a hundred broken reflections, unsure which one is most real.
