What Yuna Sounds Like at 2 AM

Yuna arrived in the United States in 2012 with a sound that didn’t quite fit anywhere—too soft for pop, too pop for folk, too personal to function as background music. She’s Malaysian, which meant most western audiences had never heard of her; she sings in a near-whisper that carries anyway. Live Your Life is the kind of song that finds you while you’re doing something else and then makes you stop doing it. She has a quality very few singers manage: she sounds like she means exactly what she’s saying, no performance of meaning, just the thing itself. Malaysia’s music rarely gets heard this far west. Yuna changed that, quietly, by being very good.