Miss Universe

Though she’d been writing songs in her head since she was six, and on the guitar since she was 12, it took a long time for Nilüfer Yanya to work up the courage to show anyone her music. “I knew I wanted to sing, but the idea of actually having to do it was really horrifying,” says the 23-year-old. When she was finally persuaded to do so, by a music teacher in West London where she grew up, she says “it was horrible. I loved it”.

Miss Universe was largely recorded in the same remote Penzance studio she used to jam in with her uncle Joe -a former musician himself -and features co-productions with both her former school guitar teacher The Invisible’s Dave Okumu and her live bandmates Jazzi Bobbi and Luke Bower, as well as producers John Congleton, Oli Barton-Wood, Will Archer and M.T. Hadley. 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.

Expand your knowledge of a vast comics universe

Almost all of the ten compositions on "Universe In A Shoebox" are by Kiki Manders and based on questions about our concept of time and space. And also about our different perceptions of reality: "If the universe would fit in a shoebox, how incredibly small would we be humans then?" Manders wonders, and with absolute certainty finds the perfect balance between a melodic poetic world and a flow of abstractness.

Mercurial London artist Nilüfer Yanya releases her hugely anticipated second album Painless. It's the follow-up to Nilüfer Yanya’s renowned 2019 debut album Miss Universe, which fully established her as a singular artist and a distinctive voice that simply has to be heard.