XL Recordings
South Korea has rage rooms where you can go smash plates and home appliances with a baseball bat, a satisfying way of manifesting your anger. Rage is a central tenet of experimental pop star Yaeji’s new album, With A Hammer, as the American-Korean smashes through repressed emotions with a quiet fury. Brash and energetic, Yaeji doesn’t deal with her rage in quite such a blunt manner, but she does show that introspection can be bold and exciting.
Yaeji has long been a star on the rise since bursting onto the scene in 2017 with her lo-fi, hypnotic blend of house music. Traditionally, Yaeji’s music has always had a warmth, generated usually by the mellow, repetitive beats she crafts, such as on the intoxicatingly catchy dance ear-worm ‘Raingurl’. Her voice has an intimacy beyond its often deadpan delivery, able to convey a robotic sense of emotion. After releasing the impressive mixtape What We Drew in 2020, the pandemic has stymied Yaeji’s growth as an artist. However, isolation forced her into a period of introspection, forced to confront feelings and memories that had previously been brushed under the carpet, hidden behind the distractions of life.
With hate incidents in the U.S. against Asian Americans surging in the last couple of years, Yaeji has plenty to be angry about while trying to unpack her generational trauma. There’s a sense of catharsis on the woozy ‘Done (Let’s Get It)’ where she tiredly repeats: “Break the cycles/Make it make you/Mend the cycles”. Yaeji is determined not to repeat the behaviours she has been exposed to. Accompanied by a 111-page booklet conceptualising the album’s ideas and themes, Yaeji doesn’t do things by half-measures, but With A Hammer never feels weighty.
Yaeji works through her feelings methodically, and occasionally she sounds strung out. On the opener ‘Submerge FM’, she laments: “There’s nothing we can do to save the future generation”, but as a dense backbeat emerges and she effortlessly shifts from singing in English to Korean, there’s an air of defiance about her. Over glitchy beats on ‘With A Hammer’, she sings monotonously: “There were days I gave up and put a mask on my face”. It’s a moment of wry irony, acknowledging that when face coverings ruled supreme, her internal mask provided her with the biggest challenge.
Musically, Yaeji has never sounded so energetic or animated as she fuses Korean indie rock with her usual electronic touches. ‘Fever’, a track which delves into the treatment of Asian girls by white males, is a real shapeshifter, starting with twangy guitars and brooding breakbeats before evolving into an assertive grunge-flecked effort, Yaeji’s delivery bouncing from deadpan to deadly. Woozy horns create an ethereal backdrop on ‘I’ll Remember For Me, I’ll Remember For You’, while the Loraine-James featuring ‘1 Thing to Smash’ combines woodwind and fluttering beats to create a dreamy atmosphere.
The features are welcome without dulling Yaeji’s talents. Baltimore-based indie artist Nourished by Time brings some friendly soulful vibes to the hazy feel-good anthem ‘Happy’. Conversely, New York producer K Wata appears on the album’s most unsettling track, the slowly twisting ‘Ready or Not’, where the duo’s voices weave in and out of each other. ‘Ready or Not’ is a prime example of the more sophisticated song structures Yaeji explores on With A Hammer. However, she shows she can still craft a repetitive banger on the saccharine bounce of ‘Away x5’, where she dances away her trouble.
On ‘Michin’, she perfectly encapsulates the album’s intent: “I’m with the hammer, and I break it down”. The aforementioned rage rooms partly inspire it, but Yaeji shows bravery beyond smashing things up, placing her feelings on display. Over the pogoing drum’n’bass of ‘For Granted’, Yaeji poses a series of questions before deciding: “Let it rest, and I’ll flow”. In the track’s bombastic finish, it feels like her fears and being bashed away. Yaeji may weave between languages and manipulate her voice, but With A Hammer is her most heartfelt, open offering yet, and with its experimental flavour, her best to date.