With a Hammer

With A Hammer is the debut studio album by New York singer-songwriter Yaeji. “With A Hammer” was composed across a two-year period in New York, Seoul, and London, begun shortly after the release of “What We Drew” and during the lockdowns of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is a diaristic ode to self-exploration; the feeling of confronting one’s own emotions, and the transformation that is possible when we’re brave enough to do so. In this case, Yaeji examines her relationship to anger. It is a departure from her previous work, blending elements of trip-hop and rock with her familiar house-influenced style, and dealing with darker, more self-reflective lyrical themes, both in English and Korean. Yaeji also utilizes live instrumentation for the first time on this album—weaving in a patchwork ensemble of live musicians, and incorporating her own guitar playing. “With A Hammer” features electronic producers and close collaborators K Wata and Enayet, and guest vocals from London’s Loraine James and Baltimore’s Nourished by Time.

Yaeji’s debut channels a lifetime’s worth of anger into an airy blend of synth-pop, jazz, techno, and ambient. It’s a generous, understated exploration of rage as a source of creative renewal.

On her long-awaited and ambitious debut album, the Korean-American artist hits her stride when looking inward

The artist’s love for effortless aesthetics may have ironically been brought into a confident big room setting on With A Hammer.

Innovative yet familiar, lackadaisically cool yet brave, a brilliant and sparkling window into the future.

Yaeji's 2020 mixtape What We Drew was a much more introspective, detailed work than the artist's clubby early EPs, trading hedonistic hip-house tracks for sophisticated left-field pop tunes celebrating friends, family, and everyday life.

On With a Hammer, Yaeji channels anger into a record that embraces fun and surprising musical juxtapositions.

Kathy Yaeji Lee, the singer-producer-DJ known simply as Yaeji, keeps four notebooks in rotation, each with its own purpose: one resembles a...

Since the release of her first two deep house EPs in 2017, Korean-American multi-hyphenate Yaeji has been on a steady ascent to dance-music stardom.

Few artists are truly smashing genre boundaries quite like Yaeji – and with her debut album she’s doing that smashing with a hammer. Since 2017 Yaeji has

The Korean-American singer-DJ examines complex questions of heritage on a debut album proper that expands her beatscape to include moments of grace

With A Hammer by Yaeji album review: the joyous, genre-bending sound of a newly-uncancelled future from the NYC artist

On ‘With a Hammer,’ the push and pull of chaos and order, of melody and discord, permeates the emotional core of Yaeji’s songs.