BACKXWASH has a new album that’s giving me full-body chills as I’m listening to it. You can call her music horrorcore or industrial rap, but I’m going to call it a harrowing hip-hop ascent to the heart of an emotional volcanic eruption. Her massive, cinematic production makes every track on His Happiness Shall Come First Even Though We Are Suffering an immersive experience, like stepping into an isolation chamber that suddenly fills with a cacophony of rhythmic rage, pain, love, and fear. I feel like BACKXWASH is digging up the badly concealed bodies under the religious, colonial, and corporate headquarters and forcing the complicit masses to choke on their rotting flesh. She’s shedding these shadows and emerging triumphant.
His Happiness Shall Come First Even Though We Are Suffering is the third in her trilogy of autobiographical albums, God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It (2020) and I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES (2021). She self-released it on October 31st and you can get it here.
HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING (2022) delves into environmental influences during her youth and times pre-dating her existence, concluding this therapeutic practice with a return to the here and now with a stronger sense of self than when she began this therapeutic and cathartic trilogy.
