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One to watch: Yunè Pinku

Uncertainty is a core part of the clubbing experience. It’s all a gamble. Will we get in? Will it be any good? How do we get home? And, as the final line in Shut Up and Dance’s classic Raving I’m Raving puts it: “Do I really feel the way I feel?” Promising young singer-songwriter-producer Yunè Pinku makes engaging, garage-adjacent tracks that ripple with uncertainty. The 19-year-old Irish Malaysian Londoner has described her excellent debut single Bluff as being about “the paranoia you have sometimes when you go clubbing” and “playing the game and showing your best poker face”. Fabulously, its final line, sung like a whisper in a taxi queue, is “he’s impotent/ it’s ok tho we don’t judge”.

Although Yunè (real name Asha Yunè) had a musical family, with uncles and grandparents trying to teach her Irish instruments such as the tin whistle, she preferred to learn programming, making weird soundscapes in her bedroom. These evolved into structured songs with her dissociated vocals layered on top: extroverted music by an introvert, packed with deliberate and accidental anxiousness. Still, her debut gig in April was a sweaty, exciting success thanks to her rare ability to warp 30 years of rave culture into melodic new shapes, with hints of Radiohead, psych and hyperpop. Now, Yunè is working on a mini-album “on the same vibe but more spacey. A cyber nightclub feel.”

Yunè Pinku plays Lost Village festival in Lincolnshire on 28 August and Adaptations, Leeds, 1 October