The cyberpunk genre is so conducive to feminine perspectives because it’s all about software – not hardware. Where the male gaze is traditionally directed at bodies, cyberpunk explores questions of transhumanism – what happens if the body becomes mutable and obsolete? The process still demands capital, so quickly there rise alternatives to the market – back alley butcher bars where organs and limbs get robbed and transplanted, cloned tits bounce in plastic bags to trip hop beats and ice cold irises wait on ice. Capitalism rules the body even when it’s become a mutable avatar, and those outside of the pecuniary system need their brains to reach the nirvana of ultimate pleasure. So it’s not about the Deckards, Cases or Neos – the hackers and grunts that get punched and pulled around – but about Pris (the animal), Major (the machine), Molly Millions (the human). These women are the (at times veiled) protagonists of their stories, transforming their beautiful shapes into body panzers that are equally seductive and deadly. Their vanity exists as a mirror image to an uncaring world, which objectifies them – they’ve long understood that they’re “for hire”, but with their slavery comes the opportunity to roam free.
Of the current pop stars, yeule has digested this perspective the fullest. Born in Singapore and leading a nomadic lifestyle, the entity born as Nat Ćmiel now resides in London. Those two equally futuristic and suburban financial hubs are synonymous for a utilitarian religion of Mammon, while also breeding individualistic subcultures. Shaped in this context, Ćmiel refers to themselves as cyborg, based on the manifesto of Donna Haraway where the lines between animal, machine and human blur. Workplace and whoredom, motherhood and misanthropy, eugenics and ergonomics intertwine in orgasmic organisms – imbalance breeds depression in the end of reduction to a flesh prison, instead of prism.
While yeule exists outside of pronouns, their work still zeroes in on the female experience. Glitch Princess explored the icy, anhedonic perspective of an android, while softscars took the pervy position of a curious alien. In both cases, trauma informed the language and movements, leading to curious wonder in relation to pleasure – sex and drugs and love become foreign concepts that humans consume, but transcend the transactional to the outsider narrator.
Evangelic Girl is a Gun comes crashing down to Earth. yeule is a human assassin, tattooed and armed, intoxicated and toxic, vampire white. On opener “Tequilla Coma”, their protagonist seems to serenade a digital mirror’s reflection: “She’s dark and divine / Sacrificial lamb of mine / In pixels, she burns me / Burns into my memory”. Sexy and confident, the album uses a staple of 90s alternative rock semantics – the androgyny of Shirley Manson, the lust of Liz Phair, the vampiric romanticism of Billy Corgan, the fiery poisons of Courtney Love – to explore the feminine humanity of an inner, thanatoid gemini; more “Tom’s Dinner” than softscars‘ sheogaze.
In their own words, from “Eko”: “Acid tripping, silver spinning, scrape inside my head / She’s living, breathing unreal being who lives inside my head / All this time, always I find she’s rotting, crystal, diamond, shining / Flying, finding, all your crying, trauma, shaking, shining, darling”. “1967” takes these concepts further, exploring the Singaporean national service requirements of anyone that turns 18, contrasting the supposed military maturity with suicidal urges and drug experimentation with the rough radio grace of 1998. That the song also encompasses the passing of Ćmiel’s best friend raises further questions related to gender experience: are girls tougher than boys, simply because they’re used to survival strategies, born into a body-panzer they just choose the paint of? The concept of the living dead, that both songs hint at, becomes elemental later on.
Transformative identity, which splits into a myriad of possibilities, is captured brilliantly by “VV”, the album’s most intimate and resonant statement. Here, yeule explores a romantic relationship as fractured inner experience. The lyricism is out of this world: “Even when I’m your best friend, it’s ugly and beautiful / Sceptres of death in my chest growing into my flesh / Until I become / The dust or your dog or the sky or the fog / I want you to know / Until I become the sky in the night / Or the light in your eyes in the morning”. The boundary between the inner and outer is indistinguishable, as the composition marries high-pitched, digital sounds with bedroom pop instrumentation. “Saiko”, in turn, uses the Japanese word for “absolute” or “supreme”, pairing it with the phonetically similar English word “Psycho”, capturing a toxic relationship that is dominated by violence and drug addiction. Here, the protagonist refers to their body as existing in a state between organism and machine, just as their mind seems caught between waking and dream. These are the semantics of cyberpunk, but the experience is universal.
Evangelic Girl is a Gun isn’t reframing yeule’s previous two albums as part a trilogy on the basis of imagery alone – mentions of sensory experiences related to the human body are strewn throughout the songs: blood splattered sinks in bathrooms, the foreign smell of a person caught in hair, body fluids mixing. Dogs appear repeatedly as devouring, violent creatures of unquenchable hunger – a reminder of the animalistic (and/or a play on the English word of the species’ female?). On the title track, this is captured with a cosmology of sexual discharges: “Scream at the sun, cry when you come / Skin so sweaty, girl is a gun”. The body of the protagonist becomes embroiled in a labyrinth of blood and leather, fruit and gun alike – a hallucinatory whirl that seems infected by George Bataille’s “Madame Edwarda” and its lurid opening lines: “There – I had come to a street comer – there a foul dizzying anguish got its nails into me.” Sex is paired with blood often on the album, a sharp reminder of emotional vulnerability and mortality as much as to the archaic and animalistic nature of the female body, which – even if conquered by men – is ruled by the whims of a cold, dead moon.
Where Glitch Princess reached for Blade Runner and softscars turned to The Man Who Fell to Earth, Evangelic Girl is a Gun explores the vampirism of Nosferatu. Sex and the commodification of the body penetrate the songs. If the protagonists aren’t hitting tiled bathroom floors (either because their legs give way from pleasure or the strike of a partner… or a drug, another uncaring lover), they see their image high above the ground on billboards. In the title track, “The Girl who sold her Face” (a distant Bowie reference?) and “Tequila Coma”, the body becomes an avatar – the “pixel baby” who is part of abstract blood sacrifice. Vampirism has symbolised class warfare from the start, with the rotting Nosferatu/Dracula lured from the confines of his distant castle to invade the bedroom of an (imaginary?) twin flame. That this violation has become romantic vision with “Twilight” is incredibly telling of current societal contradictions: entering the company of an ancient aristocratic bloodline would solve all our material problems, while toxic traits are now mere gothic artefacts that spice things up.
yeule interprets vampirism more harshly, as on “What3vr”, where the refrain degrades to the explicit: “What the fuck is wrong with you? / Don’t you know who loves you?” But then the same applies to the “pixel baby”, which is bled porcelain white by corporate utilisation: “Did you see the video / Where I livе streamed from my car?/ I’ll drink blood and chew on bones / And I will, finally, be a star”.
This is where yeule’s vision turns full circle. Other contemporary popstars have tried to expand on similar ideas before, but their attempts seem laboured and neurotic in comparison – cosplay. yeule has internalised their protagonists, understanding them as essential parts of cyborg experience. Like David Bowie, Ćmiel not so much chooses a costume, but envelopes their life within transformative processes, intellectual spiritualism and physical transgressions. The resulting albums are elevated with time, as their themes interlock with those of their predecessors. Equally, questions of heritage and culture intertwine – Ophelia in the Matrix, Thomas Newton in Neo Tokyo, Nosferatu in the Sprawl.
As Singapore is dominated by the western trajectory and London looks and sounds ever more like east Asia, yeule finds themselves the voice of a generation that transcends their husks. At 27, they have expressed the creative gravitas other artists only reach in a lifetime. Continuing the comparison to Bowie, Evangelic Girl is a Gun would be parallel to Young Americans. It’s unthinkable how they would embody the expressionistic mysteries of Low and Heroes, but it’s clear that the journey leads evermore away from the cybernetic and to the physicality of aching souls – no matter the makeup of their corpus, if living or undead. Cyberpunk landscapes have many heroes and heroines. In the shadowed alleyways, their broken potential awaits.
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