Nilfer Yanya Miss Universe CD

At 18, Nilfer who is of Turkish-Irish-Bajan heritage uploaded a few demos to SoundCloud. Though she’s preternaturally shy, her music which uniquely blends elements of soul and jazz into intimate pop songs with electronic flourishes and a newly expressed grungy guitar sound isn’t.

And it didn’t take long for it to catch people’s attention. She signed with independent New York label ATO, following three EPs on esteemed london indie label Blue Flowers, and earned a place on the BBC Sound of 2018 longlist. She also supported the likes of The xx, Interpol, Broken Social Scene and Mitski on tour.

Now, Nilfer is ready to release her debut album, Miss Universe. Though she recorded much of it in the same remote Cornwall studio she used to jam in as a much younger person, it is bigger and more ambitious than anything she has done before.

‘Angels’, with its muted, harmonic riffs, channels ideas “of paranoid thoughts and anxiety” a theme that runs through the album, not least in its conceptual spoken word interludes which emanate from a fictional health management company WWAY HEALTH TM.

“You sign up, and you pay a fee,” explains Nilfer of the automated messages, which are littered through the album and are narrated by the titular Miss Universe. “They sort out all of your dietary requirements, and then they move onto medication, and then maybe you can get a better organ or something and then suddenly it starts to get a bit weird. You’re giving them more of you and to what end?”