Love bites, and Yunè Pinku knows it. “Still hurts to blush,” the Irish-via-South London electro-pop producer sings on her 2023 EP Babylon IX, distilling all the pain points of infatuation—embarrassment, unrequited feelings, the knowledge that you’re at someone else’s mercy—into four simple words. Then she gives the disturbing kicker: “It still heals to cut.” Before pressing play on her new project, Scarlet Lamb, a listener is confronted with the image of two young sheep, slaughtered and arranged on an ornate silver dish. Off to the side appears to be a ceremonial blade that, one imagines, might be employed in some sort of Celtic pagan ritual. The six songs within find Yunè cutting deeper, embracing a darkness that adds new contours and a confident sense of control to her songwriting and production.
It doesn’t take long for the titular animals to reappear on Scarlet Lamb. Opening track “Midnight Oil” finds Yunè delivering a barely-sensical collage of bloodied lambs, seashells and salt licks, zephyr hands and rubber bands over a trip-hop-inflected house beat. Still, a few lines stick out for their relative directness: “Where is the recipe to being what I always need?” she inquires “Where is the heart in me?” Knowing Yunè wrote the song about recovering from burnout by connecting with nature lends some coherence to the lyrics’ frenzied imagery. But she doesn’t let you see her sweat; at the song’s bridge, Yunè strips away the haze, cranks up the bass, and slips into a pitched-down, sprechstimme register. For eight bars, the twilight beach glitches into a catwalk, strobe lights slicing through the gloom.
However, when Scarlet Lamb’s production falters, the cracks in its writing start to show. On the more stripped-down “Concorde,” Yunè sings “it’s you who colors me blue,” but she’s not touching Lana Del Rey’s delivery of practically the same line. Even the song’s central metaphor has been done better in recent years. With its bouncy keyboards buried in misty synth washes, “Half Alive” is the most akin to Yunè’s inspired earlier work; put the words on a page, though, and they’re all platitude, lacking the guts and viscera that made a track like “Blush Cut” so compelling. “Don’t Stop,” meanwhile, is filled with ear-catching instrumental flourishes—glimmers of electric guitar feedback, a distorted vocoder breakdown—yet its inert melody leaves the song less of a richly textured inky black, and more like a muted grey. As another portrait of artistic fatigue, it works—but almost too well.
Having plumbed the wells of UK garage and techno on previous releases, Yunè continues to be at her most creatively fruitful when looking backwards. Here, she taps into the sounds of her native Ireland. “Reckless Sensation,” perhaps Scarlet Lamb’s best song, imagines an alternate ’90s where The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan sang on Massive Attack’s “Teardrop.” While other artists have experimented with a similar palette, to varying degrees of success (the good: Caroline Polachek’s cover of “Breathless” and the bagpipe solo on “Blood and Butter”; the bad: Rina Sawayama’s underwhelming, Corrs-inspired “Catch Me in the Air”) Yunè’s totally at home against a backdrop of shuffling drums and—for the first time on a Yunè Pinku song—gently strummed acoustic guitar. It’s neither a nightmare nor a reverie; rather, she’s managed to mimic the blissful oblivion of a totally dreamless sleep. Maybe that’s where the real comfort lies.
