(XL Recordings)His Playboi Carti collabs may have dragged Tom Heyes out of the underground, but this bracing debut remains far from the mainstream, full of garbled barks and walls of noise
On the second track on his debut album, Tom Heyes accuses lesser artists of copying him. âWhat the fuck you even take me for?â he barks on Northside Needs Me, over a grinding, distorted bassline that comes punctuated with stammering, rave-y vocal samples. âToo much noise shit, replicating what I played before.â
Of course, charging that others are merely imitating what you did previously is a venerable rap tradition: the track that gave said practice its longstanding name, Biteân My Stylee by Original Concept, is now 40 years old.
Perhaps itâs true that others have been copying the approach that Heyes has minted under the alias of Blackhaine, but if so, it seems faintly remarkable, because his approach is so determinedly unique.
Whatever you thought the early 2020s were going to throw up musically, itâs highly unlikely you would have predicted the arrival of an artist who expresses northern working-class despondency through dance â involving choreography Heyes suggested was inspired in equal part by Japanese butoh theatre and the staggering gait of synthetic cannabis users â and a sound that that splits the difference between UK drill
and extreme electronics.
The comparison that kept suggesting itself during Blackhaineâs more scourging moments â 2021âs And Salford Falls Apart, or Cold Summer, his 2023 collaboration with French producer Aho Ssan â was Whitehouse, notorious pioneers of post-industrial power electronics, whose early pitch involved making âthe most violently repulsive records ever conceivedâ.
Heyesâs creativity seemed destined to exist entirely on the far left-field margins, but no. He ended up working with a pre-cancellation Kanye West and appearing on stage as a choreographer/dancer/hype man with Playboi Carti (âbald British guy the GOATâ offered one impressed Carti fan online). At the other extreme, his work has been presented at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou.
This album arrives on XL Recordings, which makes him a labelmate of Radiohead, the xx and Fontaines DC, and itâs executive produced by Wraith9, known for working with EsDeeKid and Drake.
Nevertheless, his music remains far from the mainstream. There are moments Saints in the Wethouse at least vaguely resembles a straightforward UK rap album, albeit one of a spectacularly bleak, noir-ish hue (as on Pyrex) but theyâre outnumbered by tracks that seem to have slipped the moorings of that genre entirely.
The influence of Whitehouse is still much in evidence here, particularly on 5 Days, which dispenses with a rhythm entirely, and sets Heyesâs vocal against a mass of punishing electronics and squeals of feedback, and on Born from Wound [Floodlights], with its screamed vocal and ominous tones that give way to a wall of noise that, depending on your mood, could feel either deeply distressing and claustrophobic or
oddly cathartic.
Elsewhere, Heyes leans into standard rap tropes only to subvert them entirely. Thereâs his voice, which is certainly aggressive, but usually presents itself as a desperate, garbled bark, filled with panicky gulps for breath.
He sounds like a cornered man, frantically yelling at gunpoint, which serves to utterly undercut the sprinkling of boasts and threats in the lyrics: âDo you even know youâre fucking with a real one?â; âThe north side needs me, Iâm the drug they abuseâ; âYou used to fucking stand for summat.â Rap has been awash in Auto-Tuned vocals for 20 years, but itâs hard to think of an example of their use that
sounds more despairing than at the end of Consumer, already a discomfiting listen with its siren-like synths and raw samples of dancehall MC Mad Cobra and its funereal thud in lieu of a beat.
The aforementioned stammering rave-y vocal sample on Northside Needs Me keeps repeating the phrase âjump, babyâ, an invitation to dance that, coupled with the increasingly worrying lyric â âstare out the tower, girl, itâs easy to fallâ â takes on a profoundly disturbing resonance.
There is also, of all things, an acoustic ballad, The Wind, which unexpectedly emerges from the raw-throated chaos of Born from Wound [Floodlights]. It has an unexpectedly pretty melody, delivered by Heyesâs reverb-soaked voice, but rather than feel like
