- The Manchester rapper and producer debuts on Hyperdub with a corrosive ambient breakup album.
- When two people (or more) enter into a relationship, they commit to experiencing life's dizzying highs and soul-crushing lows together. When a relationship ends, part of the ensuring despair comes from the realisation that one can no longer hold their former partner to their long-held promise. It's this struggle that inspired Iceboy Violet's new collaborative album with Barcelona-based producer Nueen, You Said You'd Hold My Hand Through The Fire.
In 2022, Iceboy Violet released a brief but impactful record, Not A Dream But a Controlled Explosion, that featured their vocals in earnest for the first time. On their Hyperdub debut and first release since 2023, the Manchester rapper and producer journeys through the end of a four-year relationship—and their suave croaks and spoken word are all warmed up. The production comes from Nueen, who sent over slabs of textured ambient like rapidfire. As Iceboy Violet processed their breakup, their emotions and words poured out just as quickly. Within three months, the pair had an album finished. The record deals with the non-linear series of events that lead up to a break-up, the fallout and, ultimately, the promising spark with someone else.
Iceboy Violet's work has always been poetically vulnerable—they wrote their cathartic debut release, MOOK, while they were in a period of deep self-hatred and sleeping on friends' floors. During this depressing time, they found a distraction in noise music and grime, seeing "within it all this pain that's kept hidden by the pressures of hyper-masculinity," they explained in one interview. On You Said You'd Hold My Hand Through The Fire, they lay bare their heartbreak through squalls of sound, managing softness even in the album's more hardened sonic environments.
On "Cement Skin," Iceboy Violet's voice creaks and trundles, taking on the form of the song's namesake. "Why's it so hard to leave?" they repeat, surrounded by a ghastly atmosphere that sounds more like a tornado's violent roar than music. "Fragmentary (Eraser)" is a sea storm of wails over moody drill. "Pixel Petals" presents an innocuous toy piano melody that fails to adequately prepare you for Iceboy Violet's seesawing gust of emotions: "Let me go / please don't let me go now." Throughout it all, they transform their Travis Scott-like Autotuned croons into mumblings so deep that it sounds like they're rhyming with pebbles in their mouth.
Nueen primes us for Iceboy Violet's rich internal world with interludes that usher us through varying emotional states. "Slammd (Interlude)" conjures up scenes of a mental breakdown with bursts of clarity—drums skitter and a piano gurgles in hiccuped intervals before suddenly coalescing into a powerful stream. "Inside My Head (Interlude)," by contrast, is a languorous reverie, horns puttering around like a gaggle of honking geese. On the album's opener, "Heartbreak Of A Broken Stitch," Harriet Morley's spoken word cuts through a decaying bed of instrumentation, glitching before disappearing into a million pixels. Nueen's instrumentation tells us that endings aren't all bad, and that humans are resilient creatures, always managing to scrounge up magical moments.
Iceboy Violet, by the album's close, finally comes out the other side. At a slow, yawning pace, the muffled beats shuffling across "6am in Helsinki (Kiss Me Again)" are slowly brightened by opaline pads that fan out like wide, sparkly smiles. Bennetiscoming's vocals interrupt, like wispy ornaments decorating Iceboy Violet's biblically romantic confessions: "Words spill from my mouth like blueberry juice / Paint you in violet hues / Bite you till you bruise / You're so sweet and I'm wanting all of you."
The ease of new love is also captured gorgeously on "Fawning (Interlude)," where wheezy laughs and music box tinkles float high and dissipate into haze, like incense smoke twined in balmy air. The album's tone warms up, indicating that something sweet is near, and maybe it's sweet enough to endure all the strife of its earlier moments again. A sweet melody lolls over a quiet rattling sound as Iceboy Violet's Autotuned vocal does a loop-the-loop: "Through the fi-i-i-i-re."
トラックリスト01. Heartbreak Of A Broken Stitch (Intro) feat. Harriet Morley
02. SM_FID
03. Everything Ends With An Inhale
04. Cement Skin
05. Pixel Petals
06. Slammd (Interlude)
07. Closer
08. Terrence's Time Bomb
09. Fragmentary (Eraser)
10. Inside My Head (Interlude)
11. Still feat. Dawuna
12. Fawning (Interlude)
13. 6am In Helsinki (Kiss Me Again) feat. Bennettiscoming