If most dance music works as a solvent drawing people out of their shells and into each other’s space, Yaeji’s songs—part house, part hip-hop—focus more on the shells themselves. The New York producer and vocalist doesn’t see the awkwardness of the club as a wall to be torn down with fast enough beats and deep enough bass, which is not to say that the bass on her second EP isn’t deep; its subdermal quake, especially on “After That,” ranks high among EP2’s many charms. It’s more that the beats, the bass, and the lyrics she drips on top of them all work to remind you of the limits of dancefloor transcendence, and the strange, lonely pocket you fall into when you aim for transcendence and miss.
Yaeji pushes her music further to its poles on EP2. While her first EP established her idiosyncratic vocals—she simultaneously murmurs and raps and sings, as if there’s nothing to shout over, nothing to prove—her second contrasts them with deep, ebbing backbeats and heavy rumbles of bass. She sings (and raps and murmurs) in both English and Korean, sometimes switching between the two mid-thought, as if she’s reached the limit of specificity one language can offer and has to use two to pinpoint her music’s uneasy emotional timbre in parallax. On “Drink I’m Sippin On,” she repeats the phrase “that’s not it” in Korean, emphasizing both its elegant syllabic architecture and the sensation of being not quite understood.
Even the EP’s most crowd-rousing track, “Raingurl,” casts overtones of alienation on its seesawing beat. The refrain of “make it rain, girl, make it rain” scans plainly enough, but like a lot of hip-hop vocalists, Yaeji tends to choose words as much for their sound as their literal meaning (if not prioritizing the former). “Mother Russia in my cup” doesn’t hold much semantic water, but it sounds badass and its meter hits the beat. It’s as if Yaeji is porting slang in from a world just adjacent to our own, one with colloquialisms that roll a little more smoothly off the tongue. She pronounces them so casually it’s disorienting, like you’re expected to know them and you don’t, which makes it all the easier to surrender to her beats.
EP2 closes with a cover of Drake’s “Passionfruit,” a song Yaeji renders in her own muted palette with a dash of Auto-Tune and some extra language play. Between verses, she collapses the phrase “passionate from miles away” into the portmanteau “passionway,” repeating it until it becomes another texture stippling the atmosphere. The line and her elision of it make for a concise summation of what she’s doing in her music as a whole: detailing affect and distance at the same time, hinting at strong feelings with subtle tones. Yaeji doesn’t concern herself much with disaffection; her music isn’t about proving you don’t care, but examining what it’s like to care from far away, through an obstacle that won’t budge. And unlike Drake, whose vocal patterns map so neatly onto hers that her “Passionfruit” almost starts to sound like the original one, she’s not casting judgment on that obstacle. She’s just noticing the barriers that crop up between people despite their better efforts and trying, with a little sub-bass, to echolocate their foundations.
