You won’t find amnesia on a postcard rack or tourism site, but it’s one of the most precise snapshots of contemporary London in recent memory. On paper, the project reads like a transatlantic exchange—South London’s Jawnino paired with New York collective Surf Gang—but the music itself is steeped entirely in the UK capital. Its foggy textures, half-muttered observations, and damp-night pacing feel unmistakably local, mapping a city experienced not through landmarks but through bus rides, pub-clubs, and the quiet drag of after-hours inertia.
The sound moves in a haze of cloud rap, club trap, and broken beats, mirroring the emotional fog that hangs over the UK’s long, stagnant decade. This is music for the stretch of time between leaving the club and collapsing onto the sofa, when adrenaline drains and scrolling replaces conversation. Opener “40pageant” sets the tone immediately, its synths dripping like rain down a steamed-up bus window as Jawnino skates across a brittle breakbeat. His delivery is deliberately detached, hovering somewhere between John Glacier’s abstract mutterings and the worn, deadpan heft of late-2000s Giggs.
Throughout amnesia, Jawnino peppers the songs with hyper-specific references—DVD-era rap rivals, obscure east London spots—that ground the EP in lived experience, even as the tracks themselves often feel fleeting. “telly on the blink” drifts by in a narcotised blur, while “bored of the uk” makes the project’s mood explicit, dragging the sweat and claustrophobia of Room 2 straight into the living room as the buzz fades. It’s less about escape than about settling into the comedown.
That transience is both the EP’s strength and its limitation. Many tracks feel like sketches rather than finished statements, arriving and disappearing as quickly as a Tube passenger or a thumb-flicked video. “contest” loops like a loading screen, glittering but static; “glitzince” gestures at urban ennui without fully articulating it. Yet this sense of incompleteness feels intentional. Jawnino sinks so deeply into the beats that his voice becomes part of the texture, another smudge in the gloom.
When a track like “alise” briefly snaps the EP into focus—hi-hats writhing, colour bleeding in, pop imagery cutting through—you glimpse a more vivid future. Until then, amnesia works best as something to sink into and replay endlessly, its cosy beats and numbed-out reflections quietly burrowing in as night falls and the room grows darker.
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