In a world that pressures people to constantly improve themselves, Uche Yara makes eerie and compulsive music urging us to get back in touch with what makes us human. The Austrian artist’s sound pulses with an electronic rush and distorted guitar spikiness, all in pursuit of feeling something real. Her message is simple but impactful: “You have every right to be here.” It’s a point born of empathy, but also the beating heart of her desire for fewer people to feel insufficient and to take up a little more space instead.
Yara has given herself the mission of expanding what alternativepop can sound and, more specifically, feel like. She’s musically accomplished but wears it with a light touch, approaching music from a fan’s perspective rather than the classical student she once was. She wants people who hear her ambitious and world-building music to be “possessed” and maybe a little disturbed, too. Her self-produced songs increasingly have what she describes as a “warm darkness”, a vibe that can be difficult to pin down but is undeniable as it seeps in between lyrics about self-perception, social pressure and the desire for genuine human connection.
Sitting in an east London photo studio, her hair tied up and still sporting the sequined tunic and silver trousers she donned for her Cover photoshoot, Yara is relaxed and ready to chat. She speaks with intention, carefully selecting her words and delivering her answers with an assured sense of self-belief. “When I’m in the studio and I write a song, I’m very quick with the essence. When inspiration speaks to me, I write [a song] in 30 seconds,” she says. That impulsive creative process has recently culminated in her debut album ‘Bodyscanner’, a record of primal virtuosity where breakbeats and percussive workouts sit alongside buzzing riffs and idiosyncratic vocals. “Every song on this album felt like it was already living in my body. It was just so intuitive. I hardly felt my brain working.”
Sitting alongside that sense of creative ease, however, was a creeping dread around the ways in which people are becoming increasingly emotionally and physically isolated in favour of algorithmic smoothness, particularly when it comes to music. “The music industry is so commercialised and capitalistic in its thinking,” she says. “It makes artists have to be adjustable and cater to the norm. Right now it’s more important than ever that we stay true to ourselves and to be radically human in our music, which means edgy and not easily digestible.”
‘Bodyscanner’ is a proudly eclectic listen. On songs such as ‘Fugazy’, a swaggering collaboration with UK rapper TaliaBle, Yara is riding high. “Let people know I have gone off the piste”, she sings over a beat that creeps up on you like nightfall. Elsewhere, she flips the script with a song like ‘What Is Left Of Me’, a stark moment that captures Yara at her lowest. “Peel me down to essence, what’s left of me?” she sings in a desolate whisper. It’s in these contradictions – vulnerable yet strong; hurt and empowered at the same time – that you hear the humanity in Yara’s music.
The “warm darkness” of the album, captured by a cover featuring the artist clutching a fluorescent red Flying V guitar, marks something of a creative change for Yara. She first emerged in 2023 with breakout single ‘WWW She Hot’, a song she describes today as “sunny” – not a sound she regrets, but one that doesn’t capture her true essence. There is a lot to love about her early material, though: a punk energy to the warped guitars and a goofy energy that’s hard to fake. Take her 2024 COLORS performance of ‘Zuu (zoo)’, for instance. Dressed in a tank top and adventurous purple balloon pants, Yara bobs and weaves around the mic as she sings about hornless rhinos, secret breeding missions and “pig-poo-poo”. It’s playful and expressive, the kind of performance you can’t help but admire.
“It’s more important than ever that we stay true to ourselves and to be radically human in our music”
The mood change of Yara’s newer material is a softer alternative to the “cold and edgy” environments where she often finds herself in her adopted hometown of Berlin, a far cry from where she grew up in Austria: a village on the outskirts of Linz, a tranquil city on the Danube River. There, she was trained classically at a local music school by educators who taught her that music was a “playground”.
“I was so lucky to be led by teachers that pushed this inner child in me,” she says. “Even as a child I was always creative and pushing for something that I hadn’t heard or seen before.” She’s quick to credit those teachers with instilling a classic rigour and an avant-garde fearlessness in her: “These are the people that laid the soil where everything is growing right now.”
Those teachers helped prime Yara for her transformation into a seasoned live performer. Yara is currently touring behind ‘Bodyscanner’, with a live show where she performs in the middle of the room, surrounded by the audience. “It’s even better if there isn’t even a stage,” she says. “At first people don’t know how to act, but they’re instantly immersed. They’re like, ‘whoa, what is even happening?’ And I love that.”
In 2023, Yara told NME that being on stage has always felt “natural” to her. She played festivals like Wilderness and The Great Escape before releasing any music, and as guitarist for Austrian punk-funk band Bilderbuch, opened for The Rolling Stones in Vienna in 2022. As of June, she’s officially Bilderbuch’s touring guitarist, having replaced longtime member Michael “Snacky Mike” Krammer. The new position in Bilderbuch, who perform at arenas and festival mainstages in their home country, “came as a shock”, but she is delighted to be “playing with my heroes”. “It makes me emotional,” she adds, saying she is a little “intimidated by the job” but honoured at the same time.
In her own solo career, Yara is increasingly making body music that invokes Grace Jones and FKA Twigs at her most avant-garde – songs that are certainly built for the club. But she didn’t initially feel at home in Berlin’s storied techno venues. Yara moved to Germany in 2021 to be closer to her management team, but didn’t immediately settle into the local culture. “I always felt like an alien because I didn’t enjoy myself as much as others did [in Berlin],” she says. “I’m not interested in commercialised events, and I find techno to be very harsh, not my taste. All I ever wanted to do was to move.” Salvation eventually came in the form of Fade, a night built around inclusive, community-driven dancefloors. “It’s a BIPOC queer event that is so much about the collective and about the music. The whole thing felt so warm; the feeling of belonging was crazy for me. Finally, I felt at home and not like I was poking out.”
Yara knows that she enjoyed an idyllic childhood, one where she was often lost in music and that perhaps left her “naive” to the wider world. On ‘Bodyscanner’, however, she engages with subjects such as the climate crisis and historical injustice head-on. Like the music, her words and thoughts were felt on a gut level she simply couldn’t ignore. “Our globe is burning – it is horrific,” she says. “I was feeling it in my body and wanted to capture it in the lyrics.”
“I was so lucky to be led by teachers that pushed this inner child in me”
That reeling in the face of destruction is perhaps felt most strongly on ‘Hello Hello’, a soaring electro-pop song that speaks to African nations leading a global push for reparatory justice for crimes committed during the transatlantic slave trade. Yara, who is of Nigerian heritage, has a pain in her voice as she sings about “fallen cities” that “rise into ghost towns where echoes fill the streets”.
Today, she stresses the most important thing she wanted to convey in her lyrics was the sense of community she had seen when researching the subject. “I was so moved when I saw footage of people going back to their hometowns that had been completely destroyed,” she says. “I really wanted to paint a picture of marching, not in a military sense, but in a strong, grounded way that was about claiming back your space, claiming reparations and showing up for what’s been taken from you.”
Another ‘Bodyscanner’ highlight is ‘Be Something’, a song that will resonate with anyone who has ever been caught in a doomscroll so deep they start considering batch-cooking meals or training for a marathon. “Self-optimisation trends are such a huge privilege because if you look around the world it is burning,” Yara says, “and yet in the West there’s a culture of pitying yourself because your phone is making you feel insufficient.” She describes the song as “very cynical” and written to “reflect uncomfortable things” back at people who might have lost perspective in an ever more atomised landscape.
Yara channels a more inspirational energy in ‘Diva Club’, a unifying anthem calling for kindness and a collective approach to community-building. This song is central to Yara’s message of empowerment – she wants people who listen to “step up, show your chest and know that you don’t have to justify your presence”. As a member of the LGBTQ community and as a Black woman, she has often felt othered in more mainstream spaces. With ‘Bodyscanner’, she is determined to carve out a space where she and others never have to justify themselves.
Though she can appear fearless in her music, Yara admits that it’s not always easy choosing a path filled with such resistance. “It can be scary to be truly honest in your art,” she says. “You will hear lots of people say no. But this is what I feel most strongly about.” As fearless in conversation as she is in her songs, she refuses to compromise. As she says, “I have no choice but to wear my heart on my sleeve.”
Uche Yara’s ‘Bodyscanner’ is out now via Goldendays FM. The ‘Bodyscanner’ tour of the UK and Europe is ongoing.
Listen to Uche Yara’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and on Apple Music here.
Words: David Renshaw
Photography: Tom J. Johnson
Makeup: Josephine Bazumbanza
Location: Studio Endura
Label: Goldendays FM
The post Uche Yara’s body music is defiantly human: “I have no choice but to wear my heart on my sleeve” appeared first on NME.
