Forever

“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.

Part of the appeal is Manow’s idiosyncratic delivery which channels the nonchalant airiness of early Stereolab and Björk’s jagged unpredictability. There are foul-mouthed takedowns like “Dog Tag Freestyle,” which sounds like an incomprehensible argument at a party, while “Wolves Howling” dissolves like day-old snow into distant and forlorn chamber-pop vapor. When it feels like the electroclash maximalism might reach a breaking point, Manow stumbles across the perfect dazed aphorism and melody for the moment. This instinct balances the more disorienting moments with a sense of casual humanity, like getting revelatory advice from a slightly too wasted friend. On “I’m sorry, King,” Manow molds several incomprehensible statements like clay until the beat seems to cave in, and she settles on the phrase, “We don’t know what way to go.”

Clateman and FAKETHIAS’ dense production helps turn the accidental into art. They make hallmarks from the types of things that other studio engineers might cut from the mix without hesitation. On the drop for “Grass is Greener,” Manow’s vocals sound quintuple-tracked and recklessly tumble over each other; pianos are warped and uncanny and synth pads crepitate. As usual, Ike salvages the synths of early 2010s dubstep and indietronica as basis for composition. Sometimes, you can imagine the sounds being played back in a Flo Rida studio session. While these touches could be construed as retromania, the genuinely inventive production and references that feel slightly too recent give the album an identity beyond its sonic forebears. Layered with clanging percussion, gnarled harp sounds, and howling synths, their production is thickset yet deceptively simple—equally rewarding in your headphones and on a massive speaker. It sounds like the past without ever feeling derivative: a memory crystallized in bass, cracked phone screens, and dingy little London flats.