Yaeji

Electronic music was once inextricable from the local scenes that birthed it, but for Yaeji, it’s a way of turning a rootless existence—and life online—into a self-invented universe. Born Kathy Yaeji in New York in 1993, she spent her youth moving between Atlanta, Seoul, Long Island and Pittsburgh, where she began experimenting with the fusion of influences—house, rap, ambient, R&B—that would define her 2017 self-titled debut EP. Her shape-shifting style can’t be boiled down to any one sound, but there’s an unmistakable sensibility in her sing-song vocals, low-key humour, and uncommonly subtle ear for deep, woozy, late-night grooves. She chalks up her creative impulse to what she calls the search for a singular intent, which yielded the distinctive sledgehammer metaphor at the heart of 2023’s With A Hammer. “If there’s a narrative and a story, and I always go to that place when I write music… then everything will be birthed out of that world,” she told Apple Music.