OK, let me get this out of the way first: ‘Evangelic Girl is a Gun’ (scream at the sun, cry when you come) is an absolutely fantastic album. Look, up there, ☝️, it’s the 32nd best album of the year. The whole year! Do you appreciate how impressive that is?? Do you know how many records were released in 2025?? More than a hundred!! To finish number 32?? Wow, great work, yeule, what a great album you done produced!
I’m just making all this very clear, as I’m going to spend a large part of this post slagging the record off a bit. Have you ever heard of a concept called ‘context’? Am I going to have to explain that to you as well? Yes?? Listen, I don’t really have time… Here’s a video on A Level Context Analysis, maybe that will help? I’ll wait for you to finish.
The context here is that yeule’s previous two albums have both finished in the top ten in their respective years. ‘Evangelic Girl is a Gun’… doesn’t… Even if we are accounting for the 2025 Tax™ (their debut might have made the top 10 this year, but ‘softscars; certainly wouldn’t), that’s quite a notable drop that needs to be addressed. This isn’t some 62 year old who won Britain’s Got Talent by doing impression of past ‘Love Island’ winners using only his puckered anus and who has now shocked us all with a shockingly incisive jazz concept album centred around the first successful measure of the stellar parallax; this is a proven “Singaporean genius” (I said that. Me) responsible for some of the greatest music of the last five years. There are levels to this shit.
We basically have to ask: yeule, wha’ happen?
In 2025 and at 42 years of age (I think. You honestly do stop counting), I’m probably not the right person to judge, but I think that ‘Evangelic…’ is something of an attempt at the mainstream by yeule. I’m not really sure what the mainstream is anymore, but I feel like I’ll know it when I see it. Not the mainstream mainstream – this record unfortunately lacks the ambition of performing Skullcrusher at the Super Bowl halftime show while the US army salutes (though, yeah, that would be an appropriate song) – more the FKA Twigs, Caroline Polachek mainstream of lightly to moderately experimental artists who are still successful enough to get invited to the Vogue parties. I’m not saying that yeule would attend those parties – it wouldn’t quite fit her whole “Cyborg mangled in a car accident ready to be fucked by someone turned on by the whole affair” aesthetic – but ‘Evangelic…’ sounds like she’d like to at least be invited.
There are some incredible songs on ‘Evangelic…’ – a lot of them because this is the 32nd best album of the year!!! – but the more intriguing edges to yeule’s sound have been sanded off slightly. The 90s rock and trip-hop influences are adhered to a little too much. The ‘glitch princess’ has a lot less glitches. Eschewing a lot of the moments of quiet and ambiance that were previously yeule’s calling cards in favour of more rock influences is… a choice… that is frequently responsible for great fuzz rock tracks… but it’s ever so slightly in danger of losing the peculiarities that marked yeule out as so special.
Listen, I really, really like this album – much like I really, really liked Danny Brown’s ‘uknowhatimsayin¿‘ (it was the 32nd best album of the year!!) – but like Danny Brown I just expect more than ‘great albums’ from some artists. I don’t want ‘You’d love this if anybody else released it’ because these artists aren’t anybody else. This is technically a better album than Brown’s latest, but that just makes you wonder how wonderful it could have been if yeule had similarly stretched their potential.
But I do love it though! Look! Number 32! Of the whole year!
Faur enough… maybe… I dunno. Listen, more than a hundred albums released this year. The proles gave it a slightly lower score of 77.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah…
Necessary Evil 