Imagine you’re booting up a game console from 2002, but instead of a startup chime, it screams back at you about boundaries, rage, and self-worth. That’s Game Boy, an EP from YME, which is a project that doesn’t ask if you’re ready. It assumes you’re not, and kicks the door in anyway.
Right from the title, Game Boy plays with layered meaning. It’s nostalgic, sure. With 8-bit bleeps, retro-futurist vibes, this isn’t a wistful throwback to childhood gaming sessions. It’s a confrontation. The title track hurls drum and bass at you like a tantrum in digital form, stitched together with glitchy sound design and vocal lines that sound like they’re being delivered from behind a shield. “I won’t be played” isn’t a clever lyric. Rather, it’s a firewall. It’s the kind of line you yell at the fourth wall because you’re tired of people writing your script for you.
The production is unreasonably confident for a debut. There are artists who take entire careers to figure out how to sound this unbothered by convention. YME just does it. The track isn’t chaotic for the sake of being weird; it’s controlled demolition. Everything is tightly wound, like the song is actively trying not to explode but knows it inevitably will. It’s not just rebellion; It’s competence weaponized against expectation.
Then we get the remixes. Anubys’ rework takes the original and goes, “Cool, but what if this broke your legs?” The tempo spikes, the low-end snarls, and it all becomes less like a song and more like a stress test for your headphones. YME’s voice is still there, threading through the madness like someone holding a torch through a storm. It’s not just louder, it’s also meaner. It dares you to keep up.
Early Cat’s trance remix, meanwhile, is the emotional foil. It dials things down a tad. Not to soften them, but to expose them. Like someone took the original’s armor off and let it bleed a little. The BPM drops, but the weight doesn’t. The beat pulses like a slow heartbeat under water, and suddenly you realize Game Boy was never just about sound. It’s about resilience. It’s about finding peace inside the noise.
YME refuses to make herself smaller to fit the mold. This isn’t someone tentatively stepping into the scene. This is someone setting the scene on fire and saying, “Good. Now we can begin.”
Game Boy is loud. It’s vulnerable. It’s messy in that very specific way that’s only possible when someone knows exactly what they’re doing. And it’s the kind of debut that makes you genuinely nervous about what comes next, because if this is how YME starts? The final boss doesn’t stand a chance against Game Boy by YME.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
