Who is singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya?

Her intoxicating sound traverses a great breadth of genres from indie rock to jazz, psychedelia and electronic influences, while her lyricism asks the kinds of questions about life that never come with easy answers.

A musician whose remarkable voice has been described by Sterogum as ‘malleable and endlessly expressive’, Yanya is currently seeing the fruits of a long commitment to music come to bear. Her third album drew critical acclaim – as did her previous two – she’s been touring and performing with huge names, and now she’s on the bill for Harry Styles’ Meltdown festival.

But on the off chance that she hasn’t quite crashed into your orbit yet, ahead of her performance in our Queen Elizabeth Hall next month, we’ve put together this short introduction to Nilüfer Yanya to get you up to speed.

She’s made in Chelsea

No, thankfully, not like that. But Yanya grew up in the wider borough, having been born in west London to artist parents of Irish-Barbadian and Turkish heritage. Her musical journey started out with the piano while at the Pimlico Academy, a secondary school known for bringing through musical talent, with Roots Manuva and La Roux’s Elly Jackson among its alumni. But it was another former pupil who steered her musical path, Dave Okumu, who also taught the young Yanya the electric guitar at his Invisible Secondary School; an instrument she immediately fell in love with.

The Pixies made an early impression on her

Much of Yanya’s early musical awareness came via her elder sister who, as she told the Guardian’s Rachel Aroesti in 2022, turned her on to ‘pop-rock, skater-punk and the Strokes’. But then as a teenager a teacher showed her The Pixies’ ‘Hey’, and as she told Interview Magazine, ‘I was just like, ‘Wow, somebody out there has made music the way I was hearing music, but it happened 20 or 30 years ago. How’s that even possible?’’. Yanya has also cited PJ Harvey’s music as an early influence, and the inspirations for her sound continue to be rich and varied, with her 2025 track ‘Treason’ referencing David Gray’s ‘Babylon’. ‘I got into music via music. I love listening to music,’ she told Interview, so expect those Yanya references to get deeper and more diverse as her career continues.

She’s been performing music for over a decade

Committed to her craft, Yanya has slugged her way up the musical tree on merit, the old fashioned way; writing, gigging, impressing, recording. She began back in 2014, uploading demos to SoundCloud, before releasing her first EP Small Crimes/Keep on Calling in 2016. Two further EPs followed before Yanya recorded her debut studio album Miss Universe in 2021.

All three of her albums to date have earned rave reviews

Miss Universe rightly earned Yanya much critical acclaim, even if the critics weren’t completely aligned on how to describe her sound; Pitchfork went with ‘adventurous pop-rock’ while the Guardian opted for ‘blissful synth-folk’. Her subsequent albums have drawn similarly high praise; ‘a record of contradictions that Yanya spectacularly weaves together,’ was The Line of Best Fit’s appraisal for 2022’s popular PAINLESS, while Pitchfork hailed 2024’s My Method Actor as ‘triumphant’ among many other glowing adjectives. NME likewise joined the praise for My Method Actor, including the album’s second track ‘Like I Say (I Runaway)’ in the 2024 Songs of the Year list.

She’s supported some sizable names

In recent years Yanya’s rising star has seen her added to the bill for some hefty live gigs. She supported Adele at Hyde Park in 2022, and opened for Roxy Music on the UK leg of their 50th anniversary tour. She’s also provided support for The XX, Mitski, and on Lorde’s 2025 world tour, and appears on the Bombay Bicycle Club track ‘Meditate’. And if you haven’t seen Yanya on a sizable global stage somewhere, chances are you’ve caught her on the small screen given she’s performed on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Later with Jools Holland, and NPR’s Tiny Desk.

Becoming a pop star isn’t something she’s ever aspired to

And why would it be? That’s not the type of label that lends itself to the music Yanya’s creating. So when she was offered a potential short cut to the top in her early twenties, with an invitation to join a girl group produced by Louis Tomlinson, she turned it down, preferring to focus on developing her own music instead. It’s a commercial model of talent acquisition in music that Yanya has been consistently vocal against, telling Aroesti in that same Guardian interview, ‘‘Let’s go and pinch some young people, tell them we’re going to make a really successful group but we’re obviously going to make a lot more money than them.’ It’s a very selfish thing to do.’

Instead she’d rather keep it in the family

Yanya has involved members of her family in much of her career to date. Her first song recordings as a teenager were done in her uncle’s studio in Cornwall, and she went back there once again to record aspects of PAINLESS. Her younger sister Elif has occasionally joined on tour as a backing singer, while her elder sister Molly directs Yanya’s music videos.

And she’s leaning into her father’s Turkish heritage

Not that this was all the case, as she told Aroesti, ‘When you grow up here and your parents are from other countries, you want to disassociate in some way. You’re like: ‘No, I just want to be from London, I don’t want to have to deal with all this other stuff.’’ But in recent years she has begun to explore her paternal connection to Turkey; she has started learning the language, while PAINLESS featured a saz, the stringed instrument her father used to play around the house.

She’s committed to making a difference through music

And putting weight and action behind that sentiment, Yanya and her sister Molly set up Artists in Transit, a community arts project bringing creative workshops and support to refugees and displaced communities in times of hardship. Initially based in Athens, Artists in Transit now has a home in London, that makes a real impact on people’s lives, even if Yanya has often been understated in talking about its impact, telling Pitchfork, ‘Really, you just want to meet people, talk to people, and make things – it’s about bridging a gap’.