Bleep

Once a breakcore producer on Love Love Digital in 2009, Eraserhead has finally come home with a debut album that is harrowing yet darkly moving. Much has changed in the twenty years since Eraserhead started releasing music, for one thing he was on hiatus for over a decade with only a handful of singles and collections trickling out, as he meanwhile found internet fame with surreal MS Paint works as Jim’ll Paint It. But the itch to make music never stays away for too long: Violence is the first full length in his multifaceted career, showing off the versatility he’s been quietly cultivating all along.

Eraserhead’s art career isn’t totally irrelevant here: his digital paintings cheekily blending up pop cultural references and headlines speak to a willingness to place the spotlight on society’s ills, something he doesn’t shy away from musically either. The heavy rude bass of the title track supports grime for grimy times as Nadia Rose unleashes unapologetic lyrics, one of the many features who “linked up with Eraserhead ‘cause certain heads need erasing”. Beans of Antipop Consortium meanwhile unravels his sharp jetstream of consciousness over ‘Hurricane With Teeth’, matching Eraserhead’s penchant for the bizarre over one pulverising beat after another.

As uncompromising sonically as it is lyrically, Violence takes Eraserhead’s breakcore past, tears it up even further, and strengthens it with a range of hardcore styles. Breaks speed into grinding crashes and guttural bass stabs on ‘D.A.R.E.’ with Enduser, some proper clattering drum and bass action with that atmospheric tinge making it energetically ethereal. Hints of dub creep into this fierce world with Om Unit on ‘Operation Hardtrack’, while stardust arpeggios and saxophone take the grizzly trap adjacent rhythms of ‘Blood Waves’ into another realm entirely. The most uncompromising and throttling of all is ‘Monolith’ with Amée Chanter, where noise, punkish screams, and pulsing gabber collide.

After decades, Eraserhead brings us his very first album, a visceral masterpiece.