“A straightforward message is not interesting for me,” says Nilüfer Yanya, calling from her home in east London. Yanya punctuates her sentences with her bright laugh or an introspective hmmm and shades in her remarks with a running metacommentary. “I get inspired writing about something that’s a bit less clear.” My Method Actor – Yanya’s third album, released this month – makes good on her belief that the strongest ideas often exist in the in-between. A rumination on slippery but intriguing themes, including memory and nostalgia, the album sees her develop her rich style of storytelling.

While it’s easy to let Nilüfer Yanya’s latest single, “Like I Say (I Runaway),” play on repeat, and to get lost in the hum of the six-string, the low rasp in Yanya’s voice, the kick drum keeping a metronome’s steady beat, the vulnerability in her verses draws the listener into the present moment: “The minute I’m not in control, I’m tearing up inside,” she sings, a fitting admission for an artist who is self-professedly nervous to let others take the reins.

The daughter of two visual artists, Yanya learned classical piano at school in London before falling in love with the electric guitar through her older sister’s favorite bands – the Strokes, Bloc Party, the Cure, the Pixies. Inspired, she picked the instrument up at age 12. She would go on to practice with the Invisible’s Dave Okumu and record her first songs in a studio built by her uncle, music producer Joe Dworniak. Those demos, uploaded to SoundCloud in 2014, laid bare her post-punk influences, layering her falsetto and gravelly, low register over reverb-heavy minor chords.

At 20, Yanya was on the shortlist for a girl group planned by One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson, but she declined to participate so that she could focus on her own music (a wise choice: the project sputtered out after a year). Between 2016 and 2018, she released a series of EPs on the Blue Flowers label, showcasing her mesmerizing melodies, nimble rhythms and – crucially – cryptic narratives, be it writing from the perspective of a petty thief or singing to a bouquet of flowers as a stand-in for a wilting relationship. On her 2019 full-length debut, Miss Universe and its 2022 follow-up PAINLESS, she pushed her guitar into the grungy red. It’s on the latter’s closer, the breezy “anotherlife,” that she hints at the concepts – childhood, memory, nostalgia – that she explores further on “Method Actor”: “And I don’t act my age/ Now you kick my love away,” she sings, backed by a Greek chorus of her own overdubbed vocal harmonies.

On My Method Actor, the existential unknown of adulthood is front and center: “What you looking for?/ Shut up and raise your glass if you’re not sure,” she sings on the opener, “Keep On Dancing.” It’s a directive aimed at her listeners as much as herself. There’s a recurring motif of escaping from the responsibilities of growing older: appearing as a long drive into the night on the unhurried melodies of “Binding” or as a literal exit by foot on “Like I Say (I Runaway).”

In the music video for “Like I Say (I Runaway)” — directed, as with all of her visuals, by Yanya’s older sister, Molly Daniel — she plays a runaway bride. In our conversation, Yanya describes it as a choice inspired in part by personal anxieties, the fear of drifting from friends as their lives take different paths. “I see people getting married around me, but I don’t really have any desire to do that myself,” she says. “It’s weird feeling like that’s normal now, because everyone’s grown up.”

But Yanya, both in our conversation and in her new album, expresses trepidation about moving onto the next decade of her life: “You have an idea what your 20s are going to be like and who you’re going to be when you’re 30, and then it goes past so quickly… You’re still living in your teenage head, but you’re an adult,” she elaborates. On Method Actor, the song that inspired the album’s title, she avoids the responsibilities of adulthood by embodying new roles: “I’d love to drown in my new costume,” she sings, begging her scene partner to shoot her in the gut, as distorted guitars crash through the song’s piano melody.

“I like the idea of method acting, the fact that you’re trying not to act,” Yanya explains. “You’re just reacting; you’re becoming the character.” There are shapeless others who also appear across the new record, via a passing “you” or “us” in its lyrics (“There is no point testing you/ Both us black and blue,” she sings on “Mutations,” one of several couplets on the album that end in violence), but Yanya insists that the record is not about a specific interpersonal dynamic: “It was about a relationship with myself.”

But if the album is deliberately ambiguous in its storytelling, it’s anchored by a focused sound palette. Rejecting the multiple producer approach of the first two albums, she invited only longtime collaborator Will Archer – who has also produced for Jessie Ware and Sudan Archives – to helm the production. They both wanted to approach her album as a complete work rather than a piecemeal collection of songs. “Before, I’d always had a different track produced by somebody else. I think that really affects the overall end result quite a lot,” she recalls. Choosing a single collaborator is a deep expression of trust for her: “I realize now that [using multiple producers] was probably coming from a place of insecurity, not trusting myself to trust somebody else with the album as much as me.”

Yanya speaks about the songs she and Archer wrote as almost having a consciousness of its own: “The song’s already in there, and you have to dig out the right words that fit underneath the melody,” she explains. Impressionistic lyrics are illuminated by her vocal inflections, and a chorus might look like new words over a shared melody. You can try to parse who or what she’s referencing as she sings, “Do you feel dumb applying all that sand and dust to science?” on “Faith’s Late,” or you can just listen to her voice tip into a mournful falsetto, sensing the lost love that she’s grieving.

Now, though, the focus is on adapting this insular record for a live context – following one-off shows in London and New York, Yanya is back in rehearsals with her band, preparing to take her album on an extended tour of the US and England this autumn. While performing in front of an audience didn’t come naturally to Yanya, it has forced her to be more comfortable acting as a larger-than-life version of herself. “When I was younger, I didn’t have much of a sense of self. I had a smaller idea of who I was,” she remembers. As she readies herself for the forthcoming shows, she admits that she’s acclimated to the life of a working musician; that earning a living by making art has become almost “normal.”

As our conversation begins to wrap up, and with the focus so often on her past, it feels natural to ask: What would 20-year-old Nilüfer think of her life nearly a decade later? She wishes that her younger self could see that life is bigger than an album cycle. “It’s a bit weird thinking you can live another way,” she says “You don’t have to just weigh your life up against music. I think I’m realizing that I can just be me, and that’s okay.”

My Method Actor is out 9/13 on Ninja Tune.