Done (Let’s Get It), the groovy, squelching centrepiece of Yaeji’s debut album With a Hammer, is proof that inspiration – and life-altering revelation, in fact – can arise from the most unlikely of places. A song about breaking cycles of inherited trauma, the Korean-American producer was inspired to write it not after a therapy session or deep meditation, but after watching her dog, Jiji, eat – and realising that she was raising Jiji in a similar way to how her parents and grandparents had raised her.
“My grandpa would make dinner for me and then tell me to eat fast – he was constantly pressuring me in this way that felt really visceral and violent, and I would have indigestion,” she says. “I found myself doing the same thing to Jiji – and while comical, it was also a serious realisation, an example of passing down vicious cycles. It was such a slap in my face.”
So, with the sprightliness and determination of the Seven Dwarves’ Heigh-Ho song, Yaeji sings: “Isn’t it so weird how we learn to pass down what we didn’t want to do? Isn’t it our mission this life to break the cycles … mend the cycles?”
“When I started writing Done I wasn’t upset or anything,” she says. “My attitude was like, let’s get it done. You recognised this behaviour, this is our chance to nip it in the bud. The onus is on us – that we can do something about it is a powerful sentiment.”
I’m sitting with Yaeji in the west London offices of storied indie label XL Recordings, who signed her in 2020 after she’d become a star of New York’s underground club scene. The earworm hook of Raingurl, a cut from 2017’s EP2, made it a staple of dimly lit restaurants and ketamine-fuelled house parties; six years later, With a Hammer still flirts with dance music but touches on jazz, contemporary classical, indie rock and bubblegum pop. The 29-year-old is blithely cool, dressed in a red tracksuit by the Japanese label Lover’s Rock, with dark hair accented by horizontal blond stripes: a built-in halo. Our conversation broaches heavy topics – inherited trauma being one of them – but she speaks about them with total composure. It’s not that she seems unbothered or flippant as much as serene; With a Hammer arrives after significant self-analysis.
Yaeji was born Kathy Yaeji Lee in New York City, the daughter of Korean immigrants. She was raised in the US for much of her childhood, before her parents moved the family back to South Korea, fearing that their daughter was becoming too American. Throughout her youth, Yaeji was isolated and bullied, seen as too Korean in America and too American in Korea; she began to repress her memories and feelings as a response. It wasn’t until the pandemic that she understood the psychological damage, and became angry, then numb: “Time and place became a blur.” She beat herself up over the fact that she would spend long stretches binge-watching anime, before realising that she was once again denying her own feelings. Finally, she allowed herself to rest, and eventually “gained the strength to just be present again. I realised that to love you, I need to love myself harder first.”
She didn’t write any music for much of lockdown – instead, new habits fed her enlightenment. She took a class online called Rhythm, Race, Revolution, which was “truly life changing” and helped her unlock a more metaphysical understanding of music: “How it allows for time travel, and how it’s one of the few ways we can truly get to understand each other better.” She also did reiki (a Japanese form of energy healing) with a friend. “Our souls would always travel and go on adventures,” she says. “During one of the sessions they said there was a black blob inside of me that I had been living with for a while, and it seemed like I was a bit afraid of it – but maybe it wasn’t actually as scary as I thought.”
Yaeji says the blob is not exactly anger, but something similar to it – a feeling that had built up within her that she didn’t quite know how to reckon with. With a Hammer is about unleashing that feeling, mastering it, learning to use it for good. It is personified on the album cover as a cheeky, anthropomorphised mallet; in the video for For Granted, an invigorating pop-drum’n’bass track that eventually cracks open to reveal hardstyle bedlam, Yaeji uses it to smash up a room. “A lot of the props that were on that set, which I designed, were personal trinkets and things that actually mattered,” she says. “Some of them got damaged, and I remember being really sad – but even that experience was the truth of the song, like a part of the song that I was experiencing. And it taught me things.”
Although you can dance to a lot of With a Hammer, it’s not a descendent of the breakout EPs that typecast Yaeji as a house producer. After that success, she branched out into music influenced by Korean indie rock (the Ohhyuk collaboration 29) and experimented with hip-hop beats and ambient on the 2020 mixtape What We Drew. “Even with all my anxieties and wanting to meet expectations, I never felt like I needed to recreate Raingurl,” she says.
What she did have to grapple with was how to fit her increasing success into the boundaries of the underground club world she had come up in, which doesn’t always look kindly on the mainstream. “There was a period when I felt really confused and conflicted. I couldn’t just DJ a gig any more … I felt like I would cause trouble. But something that hasn’t changed is that me, Kathy, I’m still very much a part of that community – I support my friends.”
When Jiji lets her, that is. “She screams if I leave her alone,” Yaeji laughs, “so I have to send her to daycare, and then go out. Sometimes I’m incognito, but sometimes I’m loud, I’m at the front, I’m screaming!”