April 7, 2023 - XL Recordings Ltd
Hallelujah, NYC’s superstar producer-DJ-party host-musician Yaeji finally launched her first full-length album, With A Hammer, and, yes, it’s fetch. Filled with her signature soft multilingual humming and quirky compositional syntax, With A Hammer maintains Yaeji’s character while presenting a more pensive exploration than her usual unbridled and borderline silly jubilees of modern chaos. She’s exploring a bit more darkness here, a bit more struggle with the muse. And she’s cracked her songwriting wide open to do so, departing from the four-on-the-floor dancefloor, trying out more freeform architecture that mashes styles together unabashedly, and introducing some recorded analog instrumentation to her production for a bit more roundness and a new color palette. It’s a risk I admire.
That being said, I find this album difficult to stay engaged with and difficult to immerse myself in, no matter how much I try to sit and listen and calm my monkey mind. Unpacking this reaction, I think it’s because Yaeji’s work has always been abstract and complex, even with the house beats of before now. By removing that structure in With A Hammer, Yaeji has subjected her abstraction to an endless divergence in her exploration. Dare I say it, too much freedom. In the end, removing the structure isn’t serving the work. There are still moments in each track that come into focus clearly, but I wish there was a bit more—and I mean only a touch more—editing to these ideas. It’s difficult to focus. The beats were the frame that heightened her art, the rectangular edge that the eyes understand as a container to be drawn into. Without that frame of reference, it’s hard to follow. Even with your kindest intentions.
Contrary to how it appears—yes, Dad, I know you think your kids could have painted Mondrian’s compositions in primary colors—it is extremely difficult to create great abstraction. ☔