A roar of spiraling noise echoes like it’s trapped in the belly of a forgotten cistern. From somewhere within the din, a warped voice barks broken syllables, its rhythm lurching and unstable. The faint remains of meter pulse beneath the chaos, as if recorded in a collapsing chamber. Everything feels on the brink of disintegration. Yet amid the clamor, British producer Blawan—born Jamie Roberts—keeps his grip firm. On “The GL Lights,” the opening track of SickElixir, he mines order from mayhem, pulling techno out from under layers of corroded machinery. The result is violent, hypnotic, and strangely human: a mangled frame bent into startling new shape.
Roberts’ path to this sound has been long and industrial. As a teenager in South Yorkshire, he spent hours behind a drum kit and later worked on a maggot farm, where the grinding shriek of the machinery left an imprint on his ear. His earliest releases, like those for Hessle Audio, reflected that obsession with precision: lean, mechanical post-dubstep tracks built from tight percussion and surgical structure. But over time, he loosened his grip. The beats grew rougher, the textures dirtier, the edges more alive. By the time of his 2018 debut Wet Will Always Dry, Roberts had developed a new language of distortion—tracks like “Tasser” turned erosion itself into rhythm.
Seven years later, SickElixir feels like the culmination of that transformation. It fuses the clarity of his early drum science with the chaos of his later experiments, forging something feral yet deliberate. The album’s sound is thick and tactile, a body of molten frequencies constantly mutating. Synths moan and convulse, vocal samples claw at the mix, and beats stagger forward as if barely holding their own weight. Roberts conjures a world both industrial and mythical—part factory floor, part fever dream.
Every track on SickElixir writhes with personality. “NOS,” the lead single, plays with violent contrasts: bass that detonates like dynamite, whispers compressed to near-silence, all stitched together with manic precision. “Casch” turns sibilance into shrapnel, its hissing consonants clinging to the track like radioactive dust. On “WTF,” vocals are twisted into elastic basslines, pulling and snapping across the stereo field like wires under tension. Even at its most abstract, the album feels physical—each sound sculpted as much as produced.
Blawan’s approach invites constant disorientation. At times, it’s hard to tell what’s voice and what’s machine. The album flirts with absurdity, too: “Don’t Worry We Happy” seems to wink at Bobby McFerrin’s feel-good anthem, hinting at a bizarre possibility—what if the whole thing were an unhinged a cappella project gone rogue? The question becomes moot; technique dissolves into texture. On SickElixir, process is inseparable from sensation.
Then, amid the ferocity, comes a glimpse of grace. “Rabbit Hole” opens with bubbling low-end churn before singer Monstera Black enters, her voice smooth and disarming. It’s a rare moment of clarity—beauty refracted through noise, as if sunlight were breaking through chemical fog. Yet the relief is fleeting. The album quickly descends again into its mechanical delirium, its shadowed world closing in.
By the end, SickElixir feels less like a collection of tracks than a single continuous eruption—language, noise, and rhythm melting into one molten organism. Blawan’s sound collapses the border between signal and distortion, between the synthetic and the human. He doesn’t try to separate them. Instead, he digs deeper, carving beauty from corrosion.
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