Evian Christ – Revanchist

Breaking out as an almost instant underground star with his 2012 mixtape Kings and Them, a submerged, murky cellar of mangled hip-hop and industrial wooze, made Evian Christ a key fixture of Tri Angle’s moody, era-defining roster, and led to work on two of the defining rap records of the decade, Yeezus and Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition. 

But, concurrent with his warping of hip-hop was a drift towards dance: his TranceParty nights became a must-attend, and when he returned to releasing solo work under his own name with 2020's Ultra, it was with a blown out, cataclysmic take on the genre. Revanchist follows its lead into a world of spacious, wounded beauty, run through with pounding ferocity. Opener and lead single On Embers sets the tone, spinning through vicious bass hits before falling away, leaving only whale song drifts of disembodied vocals behind, colliding it all together for a storm of a finale.  

While his drift into trance undoubtedly informs and shapes the sonics of Revanchist it is not to say that this is by any means a straightforward genre exercise, if anything it's more a collage of various styles having their hearts squeezed until every emotional atom of them is fit to burst. He seems to always be able to find an extra ounce of feeling from a drifting synth pad you’ve heard a thousand times, every familiar synth tone can be made even more incandescent. If the overriding sound has a closest relative then it is the harsher end of Drain Gang’s heartache strewn trance-pop. It is no surprise then that the Bladee-featuring Yxguden is magnificent, growing from a gentle shimmering to full neon supernova. 

It’s a magnificent record, one that operates at the grandest of scales, but matches its ambition with immaculate delicacy of feeling, without losing its capacity to simultaneously be full of gnashing, kicking bangers. 

Listen to: On Embers, Yxguden, Xkyrgios