Yunè Pinku’s cover of Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Drink Before The War’ is like nothing you’ve heard before. The London-based Malaysian-Irish artist takes a brittle ballad and amps up the heartache with a sad, spiralling groove while delivering O’Connor’s lyrics in a devastated whisper. It’s a humble interpretation – Pinku is here to honour O’Connor, not outshine her – that will lift you off your feet.

“Her music’s always been around when I was growing up. My mother is obsessed with Irish culture, and us being aware of it. All the top legends were always playing,” says the 21-year-old, born Asha Catherine Nandy. “What I’ve become aware of as I got older is that what she [O’Connor] was standing up for and what she was willing to deal with – before people were ready to hear it. That is something I admired about her. It was sad to hear about her and Shane passing this year.”

Pinku is speaking over Zoom from her home in Bermondsey, a quiet London suburb adjoining the hipster hotbed of Southwark. Yet if the location is London, the accent is more Leeside. She spent much of her childhood running free in her mother’s home village of Killeen, 13 kilometres outside Cork city. Her Irishness is something she has carried with her both in her outlook on life and in how she sounds when she opens her mouth.

“It comes and goes. My friends make fun of me a lot. Every time I visit my family, I come back with an Irish accent,” she says. “It’s nice to have the insane city stuff – and then go over and be in the countryside.”

Her mother was a fan of trance music – in her youth, she would jet off to raves in Thailand. That passion has filtered through to her daughter. But Pinku – her stage name inspired by the Japanese word for cloudy (Yunè) and the children’s TV character Pingu – brings her unique perspective to the genre. With their diaphanous atmosphere and spooky beats, releases such as last year’s excellent Babylon IX EP land like party music for introverts. While there is a giddy rush to her songwriting, she is clearly an artist who spends a lot of time in her own head.

“Most of the stuff I make is in a grey area,” she says. “It’s never black and white. I think that resonates: people themselves are always in grey areas. Lyrically, the tracks sit in that same space where it’s an in-between feeling. That’s what resonates.”

A place in the Hot Press 'Hot For 2024' countdown confirms she’s an artist going places. She has remixed stars such as Charli XCX and Disclosure, featured on the FIFA23 video game soundtrack and clocked up 2.6 million streams (and counting) for her 2021 Logic1000 collaboration, ‘What You Like’.

“I was lucky in that Charli XCX was one of the first remixes I did,” she says. “That gave me a lot of confidence in the beginning that a lot of people don’t get the chance to get used to. I was lucky – it was a nice boost of confidence that I got early on. That mattered a lot in terms of building my self-belief with production generally.”

Yunè Pinku started as a pandemic project. While always interested in music, it was during lockdown that she got serious about songwriting, composing material in her bedroom and posting it to Soundcloud. To her astonishment, she found an audience almost immediately.

“If I wasn’t doing it during lockdown I would have gone a bit bananas,” she says. “It was the perfect time: the whole world slowed down. There wasn’t any distraction. I wouldn’t make the music I make now if I didn’t have that chunk of time.”

Pinku celebrates ambivalence in music. Her songs come with an ominous afterglow, but her lyrics are steeped in mystery. There are references to her time in a Catholic school and the inherited trauma of Irish religiosity – particularly on last year’s ‘Blush Cut’, which delves into the suffocating stranglehold of Christianity on the Irish soul (“Hit me where it hurts now / Deep beneath the water / Burning down my church”).

However, Pinku is, above all, a believer in ambiguity – she leaves it to the listener to draw their own meaning from her work. She’s had enough of singers who hit you over the head with the “message” of their music.

“There’s a lot of vagueness. It’s something I was thinking about recently, actually. Everyone has got so impatient. Being literal about everything is popular now. Holding on to ‘vague’ and metaphors and stuff is going out of style with songwriting. But it’s a great tool for expressing things.”

It’s shaping up to be a big year for her. A hint of excitement enters her voice as she looks to the future.

“I’m working on an album right now – slowly ticking away at it. I’m probably going to be touring a lot again this summer. And doing a few shows around the blocks – it’s going to be busy. I’m keeping things open for now.”

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