Yaeji - What We Drew 우리가 그려왔던

Resident Advisor

A few weeks ago, 2020 looked like a big year for Kathy Lee, the Korean-American artist better known as Yaeji. She was about to put out her first full-length, a ..

The Guardian 80

(XL Recordings)
Straddling the blurry line between dream pop and DIY house, the Korean-American’s first full-length effort is a diaristic work of startling emotional clarity

Korean-American DJ and producer Yaeji – full name Kathy Yaeji Lee – is the queen of introverted club music. She broke through with her squelchy house track Raingurl in 2017, contrasting a bold bassline with deadpan vocals about her glasses fogging up in the club. On her new mixtape, her first release for XL Recordings, Lee digs even further into her interior landscape, with diaristic, spacious house music on which she sings about subjects like the difficulty of getting out of bed (on the glimmering lead single Waking Up Down). As we enter a nightclub-less era of isolation, she’s timed it eerily well: this is dance music to soundtrack – and soothe – an existential crisis.

The Guardian 80

(XL)

Billed as a mixtape, Yaeji’s first full-length album is an uncategorisable treat that surfs the cusp of club music, sickly sweet pop and the blithe menace of Boards of Canada. Formerly a graphic artist and house DJ until she turned to music-making, 25-year-old Kathy Yaeji Lee returned to her native New York after a nomadic childhood, much of it spent in South Korea. Her output combines Korean-language lyrics with hip-hop and gossamer electronic soundtracks. This seriously contemporary amalgam evokes K-pop but has more in common with digital auteurs like Grimes.

The production here is both crisp and sinuous; ethereal indeterminacy trades off with crackling attention to detail. It comes as a shock when the vaporous whispers of In the Mirror unexpectedly segue into a drum’n’bass rattle. Texture really matters to Yaeji. Her close-up vocal delivery on glitchy micro-bangers such as When I Grow Up strives for an ASMR tingle. The Th1ng opens with a percussive loop of her mouthing “ck, ck, ck-ck”. And if the lyrical blind spots just add to this record’s inviting opaqueness (at least, to monolingual listeners), it’s very tempting to mumble along to the Korean flows on skewwhiff hip-hop tracks like Money Can’t Buy.