Viewing melancholy as a brilliant writer but a terrible roommate, Yağmur Ender recently released her debut album, Düğüm (Knot)—a project born from bringing songs written across different eras of her life to the very same table. We caught up with Ender to discuss the record, her lyrical world, and her latest single, “Uykusuzlar Koğuşu” (Insomniacs’ Ward), which marks a distinctly darker, heavier shift into blues-rock terrain.
Looking back from where you started to where you are today, how has your story unfolded? What have you gathered along the way?
Sometimes I view my musical journey not as a path moving forward, but as a long homecoming to myself. Over the years, rather than becoming someone new, I’ve tried to reconnect with the parts of me I had covered up. In the beginning, I simply wanted to write songs. Today, I understand a bit better why I say what I say, and which silence I’m speaking out of. In fact, when I look back at older songs, I realize they already knew things about me that I hadn’t yet figured out at the time—as if I’d left small markers for myself so I wouldn’t lose my way.
I think what I’ve gathered most through this process isn’t just songs, but courage: the courage to like my own voice, to accept that my music doesn’t have to resemble anything else, and to stop hiding behind certain narratives. I’ve also accumulated a lot of half-sentences, late nights, people, unsaid goodbyes, and silences. I used to think I was turning what happened to me into songs. Now, I feel like the songs are transforming me. Perhaps that’s what a journey is: wandering away from ourselves, only to return to the same house through a different door.
What fuels your process when making music, and what boosts your creative output?
I feed on the space where a sentence ends. I’m drawn to the things left unsaid, truncated conversations, silences that loom larger than the words spoken in a room, and those late hours when night fails to hide a person from themselves. Sometimes I catch something subtle in an ordinary phrase and chase that single word for days.
Literature and poetry play a massive role in this. Rather than describing an emotion head-on, I prefer building a world around it. To evoke loneliness by describing a ceiling, waiting by describing the sea, or an entire past through a single room—that resonates deeply with me. Coming from a visual background plays a part in this too. When writing a song, I don’t just hear words; I usually see them first. A scene crystallizes in my mind, and the lyrics emerge from within that image.
I can’t say peace boosts my productivity. Usually, I start writing when something inside me feels displaced. Songs feel like conversations continuing in another language about issues I couldn’t resolve through talking. Some people keep journals; mine have chords.
Your debut album, Düğüm, arrived this year. What was the preparation process like, and what proved to be the greatest challenge?
Düğüm wasn’t just an album with a long recording process; it was an attempt to seat songs from completely different chapters of my life at the very same table. Because of that, the hardest part wasn’t technical at all. The real challenge was sitting across a song I’d written years ago as the person I am today, seeing whether I could still stand behind it.
The record spans various textures—from country and blues to alternative rock and acoustic landscapes. At one point, that variety intimidated me. Then I realized my musical identity actually resides within those transitions. Those seemingly disparate pieces are bound together by the story of the same person. I also thought a lot about not over-refining the tracks. Sometimes a breath, a slight break in the voice, or a guitar track that isn’t too pristine gives a song its truest character. I didn’t want emotion to succumb to mathematics. Finishing Düğüm wasn’t merely completing an album; it was placing my present self alongside my past selves without feeling ashamed of them.
Your lyrics carry a distinct poetic quality. What led you to choose Düğüm (Knot) as the title?
Because certain things inevitably tangle into a knot before they can be unravelled. I love the word düğüm; it embodies both tightness and connection. A knot can hold you, suffocate you, bind two things together, or show you where you came from once you start untangling it.
That was the common thread across the album’s narratives. There were things I’d harbored inside for years—unnamed, misunderstood, or hidden even from myself. When I lined the tracks up, I saw they were simply knots formed along different points of the same rope. The musical side mirrors this as well: rock, blues, country, indie, acoustic—we tied different strands together in one place. Choosing that title was also a way of admitting: I haven’t untied all my knots. But at least I know which end of the rope to hold onto now.
As a culmination of years of work, which knots do these 12 tracks carry traces of, or unravel?
I don’t think there’s one giant knot on this record; rather, there are small knots tied by the same person over the years. My insecurities are in there, my internal battles, the consequences of my choices, and different ways of loving and letting go. In some songs I’m angry at someone else; in others I look back and realize the person I was angry with was actually myself.
The most vital aspect of Düğüm for me isn’t that it solved everything. It taught me to accept that life can leave certain questions unanswered. I used to search for an explanation at the end of every story. Today, I understand better that some things simply happen, leave their mark, and we may never get an answer. I think the biggest knot the album unraveled was the one between me and my past self. For a long time, I judged her as overly naive, fearful, or prone to wrong decisions. Singing these songs, I listened to her side for the first time. Ultimately, rather than merely forgiving her, I managed something better: I didn’t abandon her.
Reinterpreting songs deeply embedded in collective memory—like “Erkekler Ağlamaz” and “Seni Kimler Aldı”—carries an inherent risk. What did you feel while bringing these two landmark tracks into the album?
When touching songs like those, the primary feeling isn’t freedom—it’s responsibility. You aren’t just dealing with a composition; you’re dealing with memories people have carried for decades. Someone’s childhood, someone’s first heartbreak, or a line someone has cried to for years in the same room. Disregarding that memory to say “I’m going to change this completely” didn’t feel right to me. But a literal repetition didn’t excite me either.
Rather than doing conventional covers, I approached them as inviting these songs into my own world. The vulnerability and self-concealment in “Erkekler Ağlamaz” feel very close to me. “Seni Kimler Aldı” carries a different kind of wound—a sense of loss that persists in the mind despite the passage of time. My goal wasn’t to say, “Look how different we made this,” but to stand before those songs as who I am today and ask, “If these words came out of my mouth, how would they sound?” One of the highest forms of respect you can show a song is not imitating it, but truly engaging with it.
Moving past the album, your new single “Uykusuzlar Koğuşu” leans into a noticeably darker, heavier, blues-rock-oriented sound. Was this shift a conscious search for direction, or did the songs naturally lead you here?
Perhaps I didn’t change direction; the light along the path just dimmed a bit. It wasn’t a deliberate decision made one morning to “make heavier music from now on.” When “Uykusuzlar Koğuşu” arrived, I felt the song refused to be sung any other way. Had there been too clean or sterile a world beneath those lyrics, it would have done the song a disservice. It needed a bit of dust, rust, the grime of the blues, and the anger of rock.
Yet beneath all that, I wanted the familiar silence of the night to remain. Lines like “Poets on duty lined up in the void of the ceiling” are among my favorites in the track, because on certain sleepless nights, the ceiling ceases to be just a ceiling. It turns into a gathering place for your memory, your fears, and the sentences you left unsaid and unwritten. Before long, there’s something in the room more crowded than yourself. I wanted to release this track without taming it. Perhaps the heaviness isn’t new to me; I just used to keep that side quieter. Now, I like showing not just the fragile side of my voice, but its teeth as well. I’ve learned that vulnerability can sometimes clench a fist too.
“Uykusuzlar Koğuşu” carries heavy themes: loneliness, the search for belonging, and arriving late to oneself. Everyone seems to carry a pervasive sense of running late nowadays—why do you think that is?
Because now we can see everyone else’s clock. We constantly witness when others succeed, fall in love, reach milestones, earn money, where they live, and how happy we assume they are. Unconsciously, we begin measuring our own lives against other people’s calendars, and then we feel like we’re falling behind. The strange part is that most of the time, we don’t even know where we’re rushing to reach.
Part of modern loneliness is being so visible yet so little known. Everyone looks into each other’s lives through a window without knowing the air inside the room. You can be connected to hundreds of people simultaneously, yet go to bed at night feeling like no one truly knows you. In my mind, Uykusuzlar Koğuşu isn’t a physical building; it’s an invisible address for people staying awake at the same hour. They don’t know each other, but they’re all staring at the same ceiling in different rooms. And I think a person’s greatest lateness isn’t to success, love, or a destination—sometimes we arrive late to our own lives. Perhaps the most terrifying question isn’t “When will my life begin?” but rather “What if it already started and I wasn’t present in it?”
Melancholy holds a prominent place in your writing. Is it a generative emotion for you, or does it sometimes paralyze your output?
I view melancholy as a brilliant writer, but a terrible roommate. It can point out details you wouldn’t normally notice: the emptiness in a room, the subtle shift at the end of someone’s sentence, or the way someone closes the door as they leave. There’s an intense state of attentiveness within melancholy, and I draw heavily from that when writing.
However, I don’t believe in romanticizing pain. You don’t write incredible songs every time you suffer; not every wound becomes poetry. Sometimes a wound is just a wound, and it completely halts creation. In fact, to write about certain emotions, they first need to fall a bit further away from you. That’s why I wouldn’t describe melancholy as my fuel—it’s more like a language I’ve spoken for years. And I refuse to believe I have to feel terrible to write good songs. I wouldn’t want to cling to my unhappiness out of fear of losing it. I don’t want to preserve the pain; I want to preserve the language the pain taught me.
A debut album is a major threshold, and now that it’s behind you, new singles are emerging. What are your dreams and goals for the future?
For a long time, I viewed reaching Düğüm as a grand finish line. After it came out, I realized it wasn’t an endpoint—it was perhaps where I truly began for the first time. Now, I want to be bolder musically. I’m entering a period where I’m not afraid to venture into heavier places, expand my rock side, or deliberately leave rough edges unpolished instead of trying to make every song sound pretty. If a song wants to look raw, I don’t want to force it to look neat. “Uykusuzlar Koğuşu” was one of the first signs of this shift for me.
The stage is also taking up a much larger place in my life. You can finish a song in the studio, but on stage, the song stops belonging solely to you at some point; the audience’s breath merges into it. More concerts, larger productions, different cities, and other countries are naturally part of my goals. But beneath all that, there’s one thing I want to keep intact: my connection to the narrative. I don’t want to measure success purely by numbers. Years from now, when I look back, I don’t want to see a catalog of safe, similar songs—I want to see that I hid my true voice less and less. Let me change, make mistakes, or drift into new territories, as long as one thing remains unmistakably clear when looking back: that I never hid from myself in any of it.
