A Star Is Born

Her music can be described as post-post-pop punk and she has such a non-conformist, fashion-it-yourself punk attitude towards her image that by the time you read this, she might be on to a whole new look altogether. Keng Yang Shuen attempts to get into the head of Singapore's most visually arresting art pop chanteuse.

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"I am Yeule. The person on stage and the person in the picture and the video is not me. But I am her. I'm just not on the screen; I'm in the songs. But I'm not here either, I think. Are you there?"

The above is a typical example of Singapore-born, London-based musician Nat Cmiel aka Yeule's meandering discourse, which is to say, she's far from your conventional, manufactured-to-please pop star. When interviewed by the influential cultural magazine Paper earlier this year, her description of her sound was anything but straightforward: "There's structure in liquid, but the particles aren't so packed together. It's kind of loosely fitted and has no regular arrangement. The molecules vibrate quickly and escape into the air as vapor." To condense that into more understandable terms, it's a hazy mix of electronic pop and shoegaze, anchored by her lark-like, breathy vocals - and it's mesmerizing; with echoes of iconic post-punk band, the Cocteau Twins, and neo-neo-punk pop princess formerly known as Grimes.

The 21-year-old plucked her stage name from the Final Fantasy universe, namely a character named Yeul, and this fascination with the realm of make-believe throbs throughout her work and MO. For starters, it's hard to not notice her, but the Yeule aesthetic is constantly morphing.