SickElixir

Spirals of piercing sound reverberate like they’re trapped at the bottom of a forgotten cistern. A voice, detached from everyday speech, barks out syllables in a jagged, unsteady rhythm. Whatever structure is left feels like it’s barely holding, a kind of organized wreckage built on rotting, cavernous beats hammering at a crumbling base. Everything sounds on the verge of collapse. British producer Blawan keeps the chaos in check on “The GL Lights,” the opening track of SickElixir. He digs techno out of dense layers of metallic grit, steering through sharp turns and hard surfaces until the twisted frame reshapes into something entirely new. The effect is both jarring and magnetic; his scorched dance music, steeped in feverish glossolalia, builds a world that is immense, violent, and impossible to fully grasp.

This wasn’t always the case. Looking back, Jamie Roberts remembers intense drum practice after school and a fascination with the metallic cries of an industrial mincer he heard while working as a maggot farmer in South Yorkshire. That obsession first surfaced in early releases—precise, post-dubstep tracks on labels like Hessle Audio—where skeletal rhythms and clean, clockwork percussion defined his sound. Over time, his approach shifted. The beats grew rougher, dirtier, more instinctive, but he never lost his knack for control. By the time his debut album Wet Will Always Dry arrived in 2018, many of those fascinations had hardened into something unmistakable. “Tasser,” in particular, drove its corroded pulse with a coarse digital growl. A new language of distortion was taking shape.

Seven years later, SickElixir takes all those discoveries and fuses them into a hulking, wild creation. Its swagger makes “Tasser” feel almost quaint. Tracks moan and wail like they’re in pain, layering scuffed synth lines and guttural hooks into a dense archive of sound. The music exists in an uncanny space between the scrappy, electric jam sessions of Syclops and the exaggerated vocal textures of Ummet Ozcan. Roberts shows an uncanny precision, giving each sound its place within the storm. On the lead single “NOS,” volume swings from thunderous low end to clipped whispers, merging clashing textures into one relentless surge.

Eerie, fractured voices wander through the record’s scorched terrain. On “Casch,” sibilance becomes a blade; the soft hiss at the end of the word stretches thin across the mix like toxic fallout. “WTF” twists its vocals with aggressive pitch correction, transforming them into a wiry, bouncing bassline that snaps across the stereo field. Roberts turns his production process into something almost mischievous. Is this whole album, as the playful title “Don’t Worry We Happy” implies, an a cappella project that spiraled out of control? Is each drum, synth, and snare simply a warped vocal syllable stretched and distorted through his gear? SickElixir is powerful enough to make those questions fade away. Its sound is so complete that its method disappears inside it.

When beauty does surface in the middle of this abrasive world, it arrives crooked and unexpected, pulled from the noise itself. The bubbling pulse of “Rabbit Hole” gives way to soft vocals from Monstera Black, creating a moment that feels strangely radiant, as though the album’s twisted universe is flickering before snapping back into its brutal form. These small flashes only deepen the darkness, making SickElixir feel even heavier and more relentless. Its tangled vocal work stitches familiar sounds into a frantic, melting language. Repeated until meaning falls away, these half-words become a kind of shared tongue, binding together the chaos. With the precision of a knife, Roberts finds his solution to the tension between signal and noise: cut straight through it.