Here in the graffiti-washed neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn, where banker bros and mesh-top gays unite to rinse the workweek away at soupy nightclubs, Yaeji is about to wreck some shit. The Korean-American producer has purportedly become fascinated by rage rooms, those capitalist pressure-release valves that offer repressed office employees a chance to funnel their resentment into destroying last decade’s Best Buy inventory. So her label suggests we go to one. After all, she’s spent the past few years sifting through suppressed emotions, culminating in a debut album of punchy electronic pop that’s literally called With a Hammer; on its cover, she wields a devilish metal mallet. Leading up to our day of destruction, my mind goes wild with visions of us vanquishing a squadron of deadbeat printers to dust—two polite East Asian women exorcizing decades of accumulated anger and activating Beast Mode.
But when we arrive at the Rage Cage NYC, Yaeji isn’t ready to, well, rage. She’s calm and lightly bewildered. She’s wearing fuzzy Crocs.
To protect ourselves from ricocheting debris, we slip on voluminous jumpsuits made of trash bag-adjacent material and clunky orange hard hats seemingly tough enough to neutralize a marble dropped from the top of the Empire State Building. We look like schlubby disease control agents in a bad apocalypse movie, bumbling about as all of humanity turns into foamy-mouthed zombies. Amused, Yaeji suggests we take a selfie, and any aggro impulses I might have evaporate immediately upon seeing our reflection in her phone: It’s hard to be irate when you look so ridiculous.
A bored receptionist directs us to a dismal wood-walled space with a target spray-painted on the back wall. Confetti-like scraps from prior rage room sessions are heaped in the corner, and a meager pile of bashable wares is served up on a pedestal of stacked rubber tires. Stalling slightly, Yaeji busies herself with the rage room’s janky speaker system, cueing up a 1992 EP by the Tokyo-based artist Poison Girl Friend, the type of dreamlike trip-hop that makes you feel like you’re blowing on a dandelion in slo-mo. The music is an awkward choice for the intended mood, like listening to Enya at a monster truck rally. “I’m so confused about what we’re doing here,” she laughs.
After some cautious deliberation, we decide that I will first lob a plate in Yaeji’s direction. “I’m really bad at aiming, just so you know,” she warns, bat in hand. But she makes contact—CRACK! —and the ceramic rains into white shards above our heads. There is something too yielding about the flimsy dinnerware, though, a cheap catharsis, and the novelty quickly dampens.
“Maybe we need more angsty music,” Yaeji concludes. Opening YouTube, she switches the soundtrack to the Russian duo Locked Club, two bruisers in Vetements T-shirts and balaclavas whom she listened to in order to get in the frame of mind for her recent drum’n’bass single, “For Granted.” A fusillade of bass bombs and screeches jump from the speakers, as we dutifully thwack at an assemblage of computer keyboards, monitors, and printers, the resulting satisfaction akin to solving the daily Wordle. Instead of a brutal, galvanizing act, each blow feels like a gesture of courtesy to each other, a signal of commitment to the shared experience.
After about 15 minutes, the greasy Logitech keys are jangling, the inner circuitry of the inkjet is laid bare, and all that’s left are a few plates in the corner. Yaeji tosses one in the air but fails to connect it with her bat, and the plate bounces pitifully on the ground. “Oh man,” she says warily. This happens a few more times to both of us. But then, in an awesome, split-second move, she locates a scuttling disk and punctures it from above in one swift motion; if it were a bug, there would be no guts—a humane kill. She is proud of that one.
As we exit the room, hungry and sweating profusely, a shard of plate falls out of the left leg of my jumpsuit. Yaeji stares at it, a relic of violence dragged out into the normal world. She looks up at me, spooked: “Did that come out of you?”
Maybe we started the afternoon on too chill of a note. Earlier, Yaeji was padding around her large, sunlit box of a studio—or “Yaeji-Q”—nearby, showing me winsome baby blue knit blankets and swaggy dog plushies she designed herself, a manifestation of her childhood dream of being a merchant. The space looks like your average design firm, with its white cube shelving, some loosely abstract expressionist artwork, and—the queer Brooklynite staple—a green velvet couch. A skateboard is leaned up against a white beam, which is covered in Polaroids of Yaeji and friends, and in the middle of the room lies a basketball rug; Yaeji loves the sport but had to take a hiatus from playing after messing up her ankle on the court.
The guardian angel of the studio is Yaeji’s debutante of a toy poodle, Jiji, who has turned the producer into one of those overbearing helicopter parents fussing over the right doggy daycare. As Jiji clamors for attention, sinking her teeth into a squeaking, hot pink purse toy that reads “Chic Doggy,” Yaeji guides me around the space. She is dressed in a lime green sweatshirt and fuzzy white lounge pants, her face covered by a disposable mask. Her hair is cut into an edgy, blunt bob with a longer layer of hair underneath and a blonde skunk stripe near her cheeks. “I hadn’t colored my hair in so long, so when I got it bleached I felt like—what’s the English word?—a bad student,” she says.
A self-proclaimed “detail-oriented work freak,” Yaeji made a 111-page booklet to accompany and contextualize With a Hammer, which she pulls up on her laptop. Inside are watercolor drawings, comic strips, outfit photos, and scanned pages from her journal with drafts of lyrics. “I want to take all I’ve suppressed and let it breathe through this process of creation,” reads the opening page, “so I started writing a story.”
In the lore behind the album, Yaeji stumbles aimlessly from the woods into a random pawn shop that’s revealed to be the secret laboratory of a wizard dog that can talk. Baffled by the stubborn sensation of anger in her body, she asks the dog for something to quell the feeling. So it casts a botched spell that causes the anger to splinter from her subconscious and eject out of her mouth. The distilled rage ping-pongs madly around the laboratory until the dog, taking control, manages to zap the anger into a hammer that awakens with its spirit. Yaeji, whose full name is Kathy Yaeji Lee, starts carrying around her hammer-child. (Its official name is “Hammer Lee.”) At a food stand, she wonders what it eats; the hammer answers by striking a nearby bike. A fissure opens in the world, and a memory comes spilling out.
In actuality, after being conditioned by isolation and bullying during a migratory upbringing in Queens, Atlanta, Seoul, and more, Yaeji spent her whole life believing her own existence was embarrassing. She repressed her memories so deep she effectively forgot her childhood and developed a habit of self-censoring, even in her private journals, under the belief that her thoughts weren’t important.
During the pandemic she went through a volatile but profound period of personal reckoning in which some of those buried memories resurfaced, partially because she started re-watching magical girl anime from her youth. Amid this period of realization, she felt indignation for the first time in her life: “I had lived 20-whatever years thinking, I’m not going to cause any problems, and if something crazy happens I’m going to push it down,” says Yaeji, who will turn 30 this summer. “And now there’s this new, spunky kid who has just awakened and is trying to scream.”
On “Fever, ” a song anchored by honking guitar blips and a lopsided, hole-punch rhythm, Yaeji asks in Korean: “Why are we the ones to always run away?/Why are we the ones to always apologize?/Why are we the ones to make ourselves smaller?” The song abstractly references “yellow fever,” a term that can refer to when a non-Asian person overwhelmingly pursues Asian people as sexual partners, and gestures to how minorities are often expected to shrink themselves to others’ comfort, erasing their needs and desires. The day after Yaeji wrote “Fever” in March 2021, a white man shot and killed six Asian women during a rampage across spas in Atlanta, catalyzing vigils and protests against anti-Asian hate across America. At the time, she was in South Korea, surrounded by people who technically looked like her but who were afforded the distance to see the tragedy as a mere news item; the disconnect, she says, was numbing.
“Maybe that’s just an excuse too,” she backtracks. “It’s hard being in touch with my emotions—you would think it’s what I do, and I actually do practice it every day. But it’s still really hard.” Many Asian Americans struggling with self-identity during the pandemic turned to Cathy Park Hong’s book Minor Feelings, a collection of wry, polemical essays examining the discomfiting ways we have been narrativized by society. Yaeji has been holding onto the book for years, unable to finish because it makes her cry. “Every page is so hard to read.”
For Yaeji, it can be difficult to gauge her stance on things that have happened to her until long after the moment has passed. Her ruminations tend to be diffuse, driven by a murky subconscious, so keeping With a Hammer focused on the concept of processing and channeling fury proved challenging. “Usually I’ll just spill how I’m feeling and then clean it up later and then realize, Oh, that’s why I wrote that song,” she says. “All my lyrics feel coincidental.”
To help guide our discussion of the album, she scrolls to a 10-step flowchart with a spiral in the middle of it—page 109 of the booklet—where she has retrospectively traced her emotional development over the past few years. She walks me through each stage, from “leaving room to myself to breathe” to “I start to find gentle reminders of love” and ultimately to “I am more open to the presence of my past selves.” I probe her on details of who these past selves are, or about concrete moments from her personal history that feel like turning points, and flickers of confusion and frustration edge into her voice.
“I feel like the way in which you’re talking is basically saying, like, ‘What I just showed you, this spiral chart, isn’t carrying the weight it did for me,’” she says slowly, trying to adjust and meet me with patience and empathy. “It’s true that it may seem surface-level—oh, you’re just remembering when you were younger?—but I’m telling you now that literally, I have never felt these feelings before.”
Yaeji debuted as a soft-spoken house musician around 2017, during that liberatory, post-college period when she moved to Brooklyn after graduating from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University and threw herself into the DIY party scene. She met many of her current friends and collaborators back then, on the dancefloor—like her two managers, both of whom have music careers of their own. Since that time, Yaeji’s music has gradually drifted away from straightforward club fodder. Her introspective pandemic-era mixtape What We Drew dialed into the everyday rhythms of domestic life; With a Hammer is more brash and energetic—with piquant horns and woodwinds, angular drum programming, and trampolined surfaces—as it also moves her down the paths of jazz and experimental music.
She still stands by breakthrough bangers like “Raingurl”—where she raps forthright lines about downing vodka and saying fuck-you to family planning—even if she finds them a little cringey. Yaeji hopes to make more club-friendly projects in the future, but for now, she says, “I’m just exploring weird songwriting that is peripheral to dance music.”
Some of the live instrumentation on With a Hammer dates back to 2019, when Yaeji booked a studio with a bunch of session musicians—a flutist, cellist, saxophone player, friends and friends of friends—and invited them to improvise to loops she had made. She then took the recordings from their collective jam sessions and snipped them into samples, storing and labeling them by BPM for later. The rest came together gradually. During the pandemic Yaeji got a vintage Fender telecaster originally from Japan, the only guitar available at the instrument store for left-handed players. “Because I loved it so much, I started listening to more rock-influenced music,” she says, citing the vibey Taiwanese indie pop band Sunset Rollercoaster as one example. Collaborating and becoming friends with Oh Hyuk, the bandleader of the Korean indie rock group Hyukoh, further shifted her musical approach.
Though she has been commissioned for remixes by hot-shot pop phenoms like Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, and Robyn, most of the featured guests on With a Hammer are close pals within her circle. Even the most recognizable name on the tracklist, London electronic producer Loraine James, is a friend first and foremost; their track together, “1 Thing to Smash,” is a dreamy, watercolor smear of woodwinds and murmured vocals in which Yaeji promises to crush the source of someone else’s anguish.
Elsewhere, the theme of care and cross-cultural solidarity is rendered more explicitly on the beautiful, almost ambient-jazz interlude “I’ll Remember for Me, I’ll Remember for You,” in which she gently sings: “Even though we don’t share the same mother tongue/I’ll write it down for you/I’ll keep it out for you/I’ll remember for you.” Her role as community builder expands to her studio, which she offers up as a hub for peers to co-work and learn new skills on “a sliding-scale, if-you-can cover-utilities, trust-based system.” She uplifts her friends to the extent that when I ask her for dance music recommendations, she struggles to think of artists she doesn’t know personally: “I should really expand my horizons, but I guess I’m just surrounded by so many talented people.”
Though being a musician of her stature can be stressful—having to market your own face and personality, being responsible for the financial well-being of the friends on your payroll—Yaeji is deeply grateful for the relationships she’s built. For most of her life she felt lonely and unmoored, until she started developing genuine bonds with others through music. “I love being able to connect with another human being on this level,” she says of her creative family. “I have all the tools to know how to care for you and to know what you need, and to know how to listen.”
Her evident love for others means that even when With a Hammer veers into political territory, it doesn’t speechify. Ultimately, the album’s sound isn’t particularly fiery, either. “Thinking now, my anger doesn’t take the form of a rage room,” she reflects. “It’s abstractly about how anger is shapeshifting and how it passed through me. In a sense, the record is me just living and breathing.” It’s more of a conversation, between Yaeji and her collaborators, and between her past and current selves. Its ears are open; it would like to hear you out.
