“Ike piano,” an instrumental highlight from Forever, is tasteful, pretty, and elegant. This is not where you expect to find Bassvictim. Henry ‘Ike’ Clateman is most at home behind the decks, detonating 808s and cheap-synthed dubstep in London basement clubs. Here, he’s steeping a piano in delay and letting tiny shoals of melody do their thing. Vocalist Maria Manow should be on stage, striking vape-flavored fervor into the hearts of sweaty moshpits. Now she’s letting amorphous, doe-eyed cello melodies float away like abandoned balloons at a birthday party.
All of this from a group who once wrote a banger about a G-string, the figureheads of London’s buzzy experimental scene who reportedly aren’t allowed back at Berghain ever again. The duo met in 2022 and almost immediately established themselves within the UK’s cabal of weird art kids and musicians (see Charlie Osborne, Worldpeace DMT, and Ship Sket). Their music is garishly maximalist, their ethos hedonist, and their movement proudly reactionary, inspired by the UK’s increasingly unaffordable nightlife scene and an obsession with the 2010s. With their fried Eurodance synths and scatterbrained drum machine salvos, the group are best known for their strain of “basspunk”; the self-coined sound of a generation raised on dubstep, shitposting, and hyperpop.
Their latest album, Forever, is 33 minutes of bassy, glow-in-the-dark joy, and much of it still owes to the basspunk credo. Lyrics and song titles sound like IG-story streams of consciousness, and the production is delightfully cooked, thanks to the addition of Norwegian co-producer FAKETHIAS. The opener, “It’s me Maria,” fizzes into place; bitcrushed synths oscillate between two notes until a low-quality 808 barrage destroys the mix. It sounds like a corrupted MP3 file. Manow orchestrates the disc-rot chaos in parseltongue; her vocals are gleeful, mangled and doubled to the point of ruin like they’re being sung through a Fisher Price microphone.
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