“There was a period when I felt really confused and conflicted. What she did have to grapple with was how to fit her increasing success into the boundaries of the underground club world she had come up in, which doesn’t always look kindly on the mainstream. “Even with all my anxieties and wanting to meet expectations, I never felt like I needed to recreate Raingurl,” she says. After that success, she branched out into music influenced by Korean indie rock (the Ohhyuk collaboration 29) and experimented with hip-hop beats and ambient on the 2020 mixtape What We Drew. And it taught me things.”Īlthough you can dance to a lot of With a Hammer, it’s not a descendent of the breakout EPs that typecast Yaeji as a house producer. “Some of them got damaged, and I remember being really sad – but even that experience was the truth of the song, like a part of the song that I was experiencing. “A lot of the props that were on that set, which I designed, were personal trinkets and things that actually mattered,” she says. It is personified on the album cover as a cheeky, anthropomorphised mallet in the video for For Granted, an invigorating pop-drum’n’bass track that eventually cracks open to reveal hardstyle bedlam, Yaeji uses it to smash up a room. ![]() With a Hammer is about unleashing that feeling, mastering it, learning to use it for good. Yaeji says the blob is not exactly anger, but something similar to it – a feeling that had built up within her that she didn’t quite know how to reckon with. “During one of the sessions they said there was a black blob inside of me that I had been living with for a while, and it seemed like I was a bit afraid of it – but maybe it wasn’t actually as scary as I thought.” “Our souls would always travel and go on adventures,” she says. She took a class online called Rhythm, Race, Revolution, which was “truly life changing” and helped her unlock a more metaphysical understanding of music: “How it allows for time travel, and how it’s one of the few ways we can truly get to understand each other better.” She also did reiki (a Japanese form of energy healing) with a friend. She didn’t write any music for much of lockdown – instead, new habits fed her enlightenment. I realised that to love you, I need to love myself harder first.” Finally, she allowed herself to rest, and eventually “gained the strength to just be present again. It wasn’t until the pandemic that she understood the psychological damage, and became angry, then numb: “Time and place became a blur.” She beat herself up over the fact that she would spend long stretches binge-watching anime, before realising that she was once again denying her own feelings. Throughout her youth, Yaeji was isolated and bullied, seen as too Korean in America and too American in Korea she began to repress her memories and feelings as a response. She was raised in the US for much of her childhood, before her parents moved the family back to South Korea, fearing that their daughter was becoming too American. Yaeji was born Kathy Yaeji Lee in New York City, the daughter of Korean immigrants. It’s not that she seems unbothered or flippant as much as serene With a Hammer arrives after significant self-analysis. ![]() Our conversation broaches heavy topics – inherited trauma being one of them – but she speaks about them with total composure. The 29-year-old is blithely cool, dressed in a red tracksuit by the Japanese label Lover’s Rock, with dark hair accented by horizontal blond stripes: a built-in halo. The earworm hook of Raingurl, a cut from 2017’s EP2, made it a staple of dimly lit restaurants and ketamine-fuelled house parties six years later, With a Hammer still flirts with dance music but touches on jazz, contemporary classical, indie rock and bubblegum pop. I’m sitting with Yaeji in the west London offices of storied indie label XL Recordings, who signed her in 2020 after she’d become a star of New York’s underground club scene. The onus is on us – that we can do something about it is a powerful sentiment.” You recognised this behaviour, this is our chance to nip it in the bud. “My attitude was like, let’s get it done. ![]() “When I started writing Done I wasn’t upset or anything,” she says. ![]() So, with the sprightliness and determination of the Seven Dwarves’ Heigh-Ho song, Yaeji sings: “Isn’t it so weird how we learn to pass down what we didn’t want to do? Isn’t it our mission this life to break the cycles … mend the cycles?”
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