yeule

yeule (b. 1997), also known as Nat Ćmiel, is a boundary-breaking artist who paints sonic portraits made of digital glitches and cyborgs, tinted within a post-punk soundscape. With utmost clarity and violent passion, they coalesce together glitch-pop electronica, alternative rock, and trip-hop. 

Embracing a hypertrophied affection towards classical music and the avant-garde in their 2021 Sónar performance, Ćmiel broke out with their 2022 album Glitch Princess. The experimental glitch-pop LP saw them fusing Lizst and Ravel scores on the Danny L Harle-produced track “Eyes." Ćmiel then ascended as a multidisciplinary icon with 2023’s softscars, named Best New Music by Pitchfork and lauded as a “riotous, high-energy journey” by the Guardian. Each full-length showcases their ever-evolving fashion sense and growing post-punk sensibilities. They’ve since brought their cathartic stage performances, which pull from their fine-art training, to sold-out halls and stadiums across the US, UK, Europe, and Asia. Now, Ćmiel readies their fourth studio LP, Evangelic Girl is a Gun, arriving April 25, 2025 via Ninja Tune.

Evangelic Girl is a Gun is yeule’s most unrestrained and emotionally baring work yet, as they grapple with ideas of a self-destructive identity burning through the canvas of post-modernity. Accompanied by visual artworks made in collaboration with artist Vasso Vu, Ćmiel explores the duality of darkness, as well as their personal history to their role as the "painter.” Through the album’s hypnotic melodies, they present a portrait of the tortured artist trapped within an image, as Ćmiel’s haunting vocals act as an emotional chokehold atop dance beats. Artifacts of their ghostly, fragmented self shines through distorted guitar and noise, stripped into oblivion. On the title track, “Evangelic Girl is a Gun” Ćmiel prays to a divine, dark entity; a fallen angel, so beautiful yet so untouchable. “Sacrificial blood industry,” they sing atop electroclash-inspired production, “Morphine kissin’, marshall stackin’, run that back again.” Their love for all things chemical and noise are crystalline in this self-sacrificing prayer to the “evangelic girl.” 

“I wanted to bring homage to my life as a painter with this album,” Ćmiel says, explaining they’re influenced by the Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński. "For me, Beksiński portrays so beautifully, with utmost care, the entities that crawl through his dystopian, tranquil landscapes. The nature of painting as a medium is a reflection of my emotions, both violent and gentle. A fleeting moment of time in my life, transcribed with paint and trapped in time. Static. Unchanging. Painting has a God-like beauty. It is the fractured embodiment of everything and everyone I have seen and witnessed and loved and love forever. It’s all love, even in the darkest hour.”

As if they were painting bold strokes of color, Ćmiel’s songwriting is visceral, consisting of stream-of-consciousness thoughts and flashes of imagery. "Dudu" is their portrait of instability, as they camouflage passionate aggression within the post-pop indie banger. Over a merciless fuzz, they tell the tortured artist’s story: “Ripped my painting off the frame…/I screamed and screamed and screamed your name/All my paint was washed away.” Ćmiel then steps "through the fire, through the vein," alluding to their reverent hatred of being chained to a chemical. 

Also inspired by the artist H.R. Giger who creates scenes that bridge the nightmarish and surreal, Ćmiel brings their distorted fantasies to life. They pull from the depths of their obsessive self, rendering an entity that echoes inside their head on the electro-pop track “Eko:” melodic vocal chops transform into frenetic screams through the fierce fog and fuzz. On the song “VV,” Ćmiel depicts a memory of a lover unearthed from their distorted reality, frozen in time as a ghost. “I’ll soon become/The flowers in your eyes/And we’ll die side by side,” they sing dreamily over an acoustic guitar with such sweetness, gentle. “It's about everlasting love,” Ćmiel says of the track. “An immortal love.”

Ćmiel's untreated vocals also contribute to a sense of burning authenticity; rawness emerges as they abandon the Auto-Tune. This jarring artistic styling is a turn from their glitchy previous works. As a counter to the emergence of AI, they wanted to imbue their vocals with a “raw, irreplaceable edge,” they explain. “The lyrics take on the rambling of automatic writing. And my recordings, be it field or instrumental, are recorded from scratch, directly from the source or directed at the amp.” 

Evangelic Girl is a Gun also sees Ćmiel putting their own “cyborgian” spin on Bristol trip-hop and ‘90s gothic. The album’s featured producers include Chris Greatti, whose noise-speckled guitars complement Ćmiel’s gritty analog synths. Mura Masa brings Ćmiel’s smoldering downtempo sound to life on “Tequila Coma.” A. G. Cook’s iconic synth patches on “Saiko” fuse with Ćmiel’s mutated guitar-electronica. Clams Casino and Fitnesss lend sexy, dystopian post-pop elements to “Skullcrusher.” And the undying perfectionism of Kin Leonn, Ćmiel’s trusted collaborator and co-executive producer of 2023’s softscars, coalesce with Ćmiel’s gut-wrenching songwriting on tracks “Evangelic Girl is a Gun,” “1967,” and “The Girl Who Sold Her Face”—titled as a nod to David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World.”

Through their art, Ćmiel captures the fleeting, fragile fragments rumbling inside their visceral world. By paying homage to the artist’s role—the artist who illuminates the neon glow of ego death, as well as past memories of transformative love—Ćmiel catalyses history into the present moment. Evangelic Girl is a Gun captures a moment in time, one where we can live vicariously through the angels that Ćmiel reincarnates through song.