Nat Ćmiel appears on my screen in an ergonomic gamer chair, wearing one of the 12 wigs scattered around their London apartment, a turquoise bob with bangs. The 24-year-old artist and self-proclaimed “cyborg entity” looks like a gothic doll, the tip of their nose shiny with highlighter, lips overlined to form a rounded triangle at the top. Streaks of plum-colored shadow underline their eyes, like twin bruises. While I try to discern the spiny pattern of their throat tattoo, which could be on a medieval coat of arms, Ćmiel reroutes my attention. “I made this little robot named Mimo,” they say, dangling an arachnid-like machine in front of the camera. “He was just crawling around the space. He’s so cute.”
As they describe the interactive installation they recently staged at London’s Southbank Centre, Ćmiel articulates themselves with such sober and contemplative eloquence that we both occasionally seem to forget my presence; they speak in reams of words, musing for upwards of five minutes at a time. “It’s about how cathartic it is to be alone sometimes, and how bad things can be when you shut yourself off from everyone else,” they eventually summarize. The installation explores a form of extreme social withdrawal known in Japan as hikikomori, which Ćmiel suffered from as a young teenager in Singapore, afraid of even venturing to the kitchen from their bedroom. “I used to think that if I left my safe zone, everything that I built in my head, this really intricate network of systems, would fall apart,” they recall. “That’s when I was diagnosed with OCD.”
Intensifying their hermetic urges was the paranoia and isolation they experienced within Singapore’s education system, which established severe hierarchies based on academic performance. There were also few opportunities to leave the house, because of the money required to do anything in one of the world’s richest countries, and the caution their parents enforced after Ćmiel had been hospitalized for asthma-related complications as a child. Ćmiel turned to virtual simulations for escape—multiplayer video games, forums, and Tumblr—and began developing an artistic persona called yeule, named after a character from Final Fantasy. “I created my own reality from a young age,” they emphasize, “because I knew the outside was fucked-up and annoying.”
Ćmiel’s talent for world-building—and their grasp of the complexities of identity-formation both online and off—shines through on their recent second album as yeule, Glitch Princess. The record’s apocalyptic pop sits at the nexus of Visions-era Grimes, Crystal Castles, and noise music; like the horizon after a nuclear explosion, it has a beautiful and disturbing fluorescence. You could imagine the songs as lullabies from Siri’s “aborted daughter” Eerie, an invented personality who Ćmiel once identified as their “spirit cyborg.” The record often embodies a splintered and childlike consciousness, evoking a subject who’s bewildered by the harshness of their circumstances. “Can you be a friend to me? People leave so suddenly,” Ćmiel sings on the sputtering “Friendly Machine.” Fundamentally, the high-tech concept works to magnify basic human cravings for love and belonging. “I know I’m oversharing, okay,” Ćmiel says wryly. “I’m basically Asian Anne Sexton.”
Glitch Princess builds on the cyber landscape of Ćmiel’s ambient-pop debut, 2019’s Serotonin II, which they wrote and released while still in college. After high school, they moved to London to study fine art at Central Saint Martins and expanded their artistic arsenal in the process, making videos, coding installations, and building their own effects pedals. Surrounded by like-minded people for the first time, they developed creatively and interpersonally. “I came out of my shell,” Ćmiel says, mentioning their best friend Hebe, or the artist Raw2.2, who directed the video for their song “Pocky Boy.” “My friends taught me how to interact in real life.”
College also fed their voracious appetite for reading and intellectual inquiry. “I had some fines after I graduated because I kept my library books,” they confess, showing off a stash of overdue texts that includes work by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, filmmaker Hito Steyerl, and painter Paul Thek. As of late, Ćmiel’s most prominent interest is in cyborg theory—thinkers like Donna Haraway and Anne Balsamo, whose critical lens on gender and technology has helped them clarify what it means to be non-binary. Ćmiel says that if they weren’t a musician, they’d probably pursue something like philosophy. “I just love proper discourse.”
As the afternoon stretches into the evening, our conversation winds through Ćmiel’s gripes about the metaverse (“No, we don’t want to recreate office space! We want to be able to fly into other people and dance as a frog”) to their fondness for leaving strange online reviews (“I went to this out-of-nowhere beach in the Isle of Man, and I wrote, like, ‘This is a great place if you want to hide a body”). They become more jittery and loose, their talking style absorbing the phrasings of Twitter, where Ćmiel will go on tweet-and-delete rampages and get schooled on new lingo. “Linguistics evolves so fucking fast,” they grumble. “I didn’t know what ‘she ate’ meant until a few weeks ago.”
When they feel goofy, they’ll cover their mouth with their hand like a snickering stan and hoist their phone up to the Facebook-mom selfie angle, making their eyes look crazed and humongous. Their British accent sometimes slips into a tangy, loose Singaporean one, like when they prattle about onetime PC Music artist Danny L Harle, who co-produced Glitch Princess: “I was like, holy shit, this white guy is actually fun-nee.” The two met in 2018 and forged a friendship based on a similar taste in memes and a love for gaming. “Danny’s wife got him Elden Ring for his birthday,” they exclaim, their eyes widening. “I want to marry her.”
Ćmiel met another collaborator, the Japanese rapper Tohji, after noticing their work with the London collective Eastern Margins, which celebrates club music across East and Southeast Asia. They followed each other on Instagram and started trading demos. “I’m so confessional, and he’s just singing about his car,” they say, chuckling. “There’s something quite camp about that.” After our interview, Ćmiel plans on recording vocal takes for some new material Tohji recently sent over.
Within the next few months, Ćmiel will open for Charli XCX and embark on their own U.S. tour. They’re almost finished with a new album, which they plan to release later this year. “It’s going to sound like emo for cyborgs,” they say, which is to say more acoustically-driven than the glitched-out music they’re largely known for. While they initially started making electronic music because they were too shy to join a band, they’ve always liked emo and indie rock, citing favorites like Bright Eyes, the National, Adrianne Lenker, and Mazzy Star. (“I’ve done so many Mitski covers, but I didn’t want to go public on my Mitski obsession.”) They started practicing the guitar more during the pandemic, hoping to incorporate acoustic sounds beyond just their covers. “I have artist’s anxiety sometimes, like do I have to maintain an aesthetic?” they wonder. “But artists develop and I think this is where I’m developing.”
Ćmiel has been seeing a regular therapist who has helped them curb some destructive tendencies, so their music has started to shed some of its nihilism. “I wouldn’t say that all the songs on the new album are happy, but I think it’s sweeter,” they say. “I’m coming to a point where I’m tired of being self-loathing. This is no longer Tumblr 2012.”
Nat Ćmiel: So I’m inspired by a lot of subcultures, especially in Asian fashion. Some of my makeup is inspired by [Japanese] gyaru culture, but I don’t tan myself like crazy. I’ve always been really into making eyes look totally different than what they are, accentuating my Asian features but also creating illusions. When I was 9, I would draw eyeliner to make myself look like a panda, because I had this panda stuffed animal. My mom hated it. I just don’t like being perceived as conventionally pretty. I don’t want people to look at me and be like, “You’re so hot.” I want them to be like, “Oh, that’s interesting.”
I was really inspired by how electronics are manufactured. One of my most prized possessions is a black-and-white Nintendo DS, and I noticed that portable consoles always have a line in the casing. I wanted to see what I would look like if my face was constructed like that.
I’ve also been really obsessed with deep sea creatures like axolotl, which look like aliens. They’re actually one of my main inspirations for color schemes. Sometimes when I’m trying to look more normal, I ask myself: Why am I following trends like big brows and making my eyes look bigger? How can I subvert the standards put on me and make things my own style instead of trying to look white? I feel like that’s part of the Asian struggle—having to be sublimated into whiteness to be seen as beautiful. That’s why I go towards creatures for my inspiration; there was a point where my makeup was inspired by green moss.
When I was in art school, I was introduced to Art Nouveau and Pre-Raphaelite style. I was sitting there thinking, Why does mystification always come down to putting a white ginger woman on a pedestal? You know what, I’m gonna rock long ginger hair and be Asian. You have to consider the lens with which things are captured.
For my “Pretty Bones” video, I worked with [director] Joy Song, and we were trying to recreate these Baroque still life paintings that we both love. We wanted to go so overboard with the aestheticism to comment on how something looking good on camera doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s functional.
I was a really active user on [the pro-anorexia website] MyProAna when I was a kid. It’s so fucked up. It instills this idea that it’s beautiful to be unwell. You’re just hung up on wanting to be sick. And Tumblr was actually one of the main things that made me feel normal to be fucked up. Even to this day, I struggle with eating regular meals. It’s not really about weight, but about control. I didn’t really feel comfortable with the idea of eating food.
I wrote “Don’t Be So Hard On Your Own Beauty” as a diary entry, when I was full of self-hatred over ridiculous things about my image. My friend Kin made me realize that there are more meaningful things to appreciate in life. And then I thought, Why am I so concerned about beauty? I didn’t know how to be accepting of myself until recently.
Matilda and Penelope have existed outside the yeule world for a while. It’s actually a private thing that I started to express more publicly to my fans, because they had some cameos in my music videos. Matilda is the one with the short, black hair. She’s a silent film actor, and she’s very classy. She loves to listen to classical music and sing along to someone playing on piano. But she’s got an obsession with blood, so she pretends to be a vampire, but she’s actually not.
Penelope is a retired fairy from the southern regions of Iceland—actually, contrary to popular belief, we may not know where Penelope is from. Penelope is the one with the blonde curly hair in “Poison Arrow.” She can shoot an arrow up to 6,000 miles away. She never drinks coffee, only green tea and she likes long nails—she says it’s a form of self defense rather than vanity. There’s another one I don’t really talk about, Six. She’s a very spoiled brat really. She’s a baby, so everyone takes care of her. Basically me when I’m being needy.
The characterization of these people is very fun to do, and it’s a way for me to process repressed sides of me that I might not be comfortable with being all the time. It’s like being in drag, you know? My love for wigs and makeup and the performance of a certain gender is from drag culture.
I wrote an entire essay on techno-Orientalism in uni. As an Asian, as an actual fucking Chinese person, I have always cringed when I see a white person trying to use Asian aesthetics as an accessory. Using Google Translate to translate like a cool piece of text and use it as a username, I’m like, shut up. Historically, it’s been so difficult for us to make it in this industry—Rina [Sawayama] fought so hard to get where she is. So when a non-Asian person tries to take our place and further their aesthetic using elements of Asian culture, it becomes unfair. A way for me to deal is reclaiming it. If there’s anyone that gets to inhabit this aesthetic, it’s me as an Asian person. Like do not wear the schoolgirl outfit if you’re white.
Oh, definitely—it’s very nationalist. If you’re not for Singapore, then say goodbye to grants or government sponsorships. And the education system made me meticulous, in a fucked up way. It was crazy being ostracized if you didn’t hit a certain number—like, goodbye. There’s also not a lot to do if you don’t have money. It’s like a theme park sometimes—that’s why I was in my room making music and doing stuff on my computer.
Singapore will always be my home though, and there are many nice things about it—like, bro the sunsets are crazy, the sky is on fire. And now, after living in the UK since university, I can go back and see it in a different light. I love seeing my friends, hearing Singaporean accents. Speaking in half Cantonese and half English is so funny because nobody else can understand what we’re saying. Our slang is half Hokkien as well. It just makes me feel like I have a sense of community.
