EXPRESS YOURSELF

Ashanti Mutinta, aka Backxwash, is the rapper the metal world didn’t know it needed until she reinvented heavy music with last year’s astonishing album, God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It. A sublime mix of perfectly pitched metal samples, a bleak, horrorcore aesthetic, a visceral rage and lyrical vulnerability, it genuinely sounds like nothing else, taking her from open mic jam sessions to award-winning acclaim at lightning speed.

Now she returns with I Lie Here Buried With My Rings And My Dresses, an even more anguished work that delves into the darkest parts of her psyche over swathes of industrial noise.

“It’s kind of like when you’re watching a horror movie, and you’re anticipating the happy ending, the ending of triumph,” she says, explaining the title via Zoom from her adopted hometown of Montreal. “But this is like where that doesn’t happen, and the protagonist just bleeds out. Pain is the central theme to the project, and this is me not fighting back. I think there was more of a fighting chance