“Ike Piano” feels like an intruder on its own record—a brief moment of clarity inside Bassvictim’s usual chaos. It’s tasteful, crystalline, unhurried. You could almost call it elegant, a word that feels allergic to their scene. Henry “Ike” Clateman, the group’s beat architect and chaos merchant, trades his usual sub-bass detonations and slapdash dubstep for something closer to vapor. The track hangs there, weightless, as if suspended in vape fog—tiny melodies circling a delayed piano line that refuses to resolve.
Maria Manow, meanwhile, sounds miles away from the basement clubs that built her mythos. Once the face of sweaty, DIY ecstasy—half singer, half performance artist, the kind of person who could turn a malfunctioning smoke machine into an emotional prop—she now drifts through cello tones and clouded harmonies. Her voice feels untethered, like a balloon slowly losing helium over the course of a verse.
It’s a strange evolution for a duo who once wrote an entire club anthem about a G-string and allegedly got themselves banned from Berghain in the process. Since their collision in 2022, Bassvictim have become both joke and prophecy in London’s increasingly surreal art-music underground—a rotating cast of overcaffeinated weirdos orbiting names like Charlie Osborne, Worldpeace DMT, and Ship Sket. Their sound, dubbed “basspunk,” emerged from the collision of dubstep, hyperpop, and nihilistic irony. The aesthetic: fried synths, pixelated percussion, lyrics that sound like late-night Discord ramblings. The ethos: if it’s broken, blow it up louder.
Forever, their second album, doesn’t so much abandon that idea as melt it. Across 33 minutes, the duo build something slippery and disarmingly pretty out of the wreckage—an album that smells faintly of Monster Energy and incense. The production, assisted by Norwegian polymath FAKETHIAS, feels cooked in the best sense: scorched edges, melting compression, every sound glowing from the inside out.
The opener, “It’s Me Maria,” captures their approach in miniature. Bitcrushed synths flicker like corrupted YouTube uploads, then collapse under an 808 barrage that sounds like it’s clipping in real time. Manow sings—or maybe sighs—in a blur of double-tracked gloss, her words dissolving into digital decay. She sounds like she’s serenading the dial-up modem. That broken intimacy is the hook: she makes ruin feel devotional.
Throughout Forever, Manow’s voice becomes both compass and contagion. On “Dog Tag Freestyle,” she chews through syllables like she’s in an argument only she can hear. “Wolves Howling” evaporates into fragile chamber-pop, a snowflake melting on contact. And on “I’m Sorry, King,” her murmured non sequiturs twist into the album’s most devastating moment: “We don’t know what way to go.” It’s accidental wisdom, the kind that happens when the beat caves in and everyone stops dancing for half a second.
Clateman and FAKETHIAS treat imperfection like texture. They build whole movements from sonic accidents other producers would delete without thinking: overdriven vocals, crunched stems, the hiss of a laptop fan bleeding into the master. “Grass Is Greener” could collapse at any moment—pianos warp, vocals tumble in five directions—but somehow the chaos coheres. Their production feels alive in the way of feral things: unpredictable but instinctually right.
There’s a retro ache running through it all, too. The synths recall 2010s dubstep and the brief utopia of indie-tronica, sounds you might’ve heard in a Flo Rida deep cut or a Tumblr-era mixtape. But Bassvictim’s gift is timing—they reanimate these ghosts before nostalgia can set in. It doesn’t feel like retromania so much as reanimation: a half-corrupted memory pulsing back to life through cracked speakers.
Forever sounds like the past seen through a dirty lens—basslines smeared with reverb, phone screens lighting up in dark London flats, the city’s nightlife dream flickering between myth and eviction notice. It’s a record about remembering what euphoria used to feel like and trying to fake it well enough to believe again.
And somehow, amid the ruin, “Ike Piano” plays on—gentle, human, almost too sincere. The revolution is still loud, just quieter now.
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