I still remember the first time I heard Backxwash. Late at night, headphones on, lights off, family sleeping upstairs. Her voice crawled through my skull and stayed there for days. I’d never heard anything remotely like it. That same feeling hit me when I pressed play on “Only Dust Remains.”
The first thing you hear is that voice—raw, guttural, crackling with tension. She doesn’t ease you into opener, “Black Lazarus.” She throws you headfirst into the void.
“Pray for me,” she demands through a haze of haunted choral loops, “ain’t no one here saving me.” No fake promises of redemption. Just the dead weight of existing when you’re not sure you want to.
Yet somewhere beneath all that wreckage, a heartbeat stubbornly persists.
Only Dust Remains marks a shift from Backxwash’s previous work. The Montreal artist (born Ashanti Mutinta) spent the last few years crafting a trilogy that began with her Polaris Prize-winning God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out Of It and wrapped with 2022’s His Happiness Shall Come First Even Though We Are Suffering. Those records were relentless nightmares—all industrial chaos, Black Sabbath samples, and exorcisms masquerading as verses.
This new album breathes differently. The apocalypse hasn’t been cancelled, but Mutinta’s found pockets of air within it. She’s still wading through darkness, but now she’s stopping to examine what she finds there. It reminds me a bit of what Lingua Ignota did with “Caligula,” though without the classical elements—more like if Moor Mother and Pharmakon got trapped in an elevator with only a sampler and their trauma for company.
“Wake Up” hits like a sledgehammer to the ribcage. The repeated refrain “Wake the FUCK up” serves as both a desperate plea to herself and perhaps to society at large.
The production clangs and crashes—decaying synths colliding with industrial drums—but there’s an unexpected melodic thread running through it. It’s boom-bap dragged through a power electronics filter, both punishing and weirdly catchy. Mutinta sounds simultaneously numb and hyper-aware, mining her despair with a gallows humour that catches you off guard. “I might do it, but not today,” she raps. “There’s a game coming out that I really wanna fuckin’ play.” You laugh nervously, because what else can you do?
The final lines reference Dylan Thomas’s famous poem with “I will not go gentle,” again suggesting a simultaneous desire for death and defiance against it.
She’s mapping brutal territory throughout the album—mental illness, suicidal thoughts, generational trauma. None of it gets reduced to tidy slogans, though. Instead, they appear as fragments caught in broken mirrors, glimpsed for a second before vanishing.
On “History of Violence,” Mutinta crafts a dizzying monologue that buckles under its own weight. Gaza, Congo, South Sudan—she references global atrocities not as performative virtue signalling but as genuine human bewilderment. “Why the fuck am I complaining here,” she asks, “when there’s kids in Gaza with a missing father?”
The album finds brief moments to exhale. “DISSOCIATION” opens up sonically with post-rock textures that shimmer against the darkness. Chloe Hotline’s guest vocals drift through the production like smoke. It’s hardly sunshine and rainbows, but there’s space here—and for Backxwash, simply breathing becomes an act of defiance.
Much of this record feels exactly like that: a quiet, stubborn argument for sticking around. Not some triumph over adversity. Just the mundane, exhausting business of not dying.
“Stairway to Heaven” (no, not that one!) floats against ambient funeral tones, meditating on death with something approaching tranquility. Lyrics about cremation and end-of-life rituals hit with the strange intimacy of sitting alone with someone’s ashes, feeling closer to them than you sometimes did when they were breathing.
The title track closes things out with ghostly choirs rising toward something almost peaceful. Not an ending so much as an exhale. A letting go.
Throughout it all, Mutinta’s voice remains the centre of gravity, switching from growls to measured verses to flat statements of fact. The words flow with weighty deliberateness, like each syllable costs something to deliver. She sounds like someone with nothing to prove and everything to say.
That’s not to suggest the album lacks teeth. “Undesirable” brings back the metallic edge of her earlier work, mashing industrial crunch against horrorcore atmosphere and boom-bap rhythms. But even at its most aggressive, the record feels deliberately crafted rather than chaotically destructive.
Her production has evolved—still drawing from her signature mix of gothic horror, African percussion, noise, ambient textures, and hip-hop foundations, but weaving them together with newfound fluidity. There are moments where the 808s hit with that classic Memphis phonk weight, then suddenly dissolve into noise. The sonic assault has transformed into something more surgical.
The personal remains political throughout. The fury in “History of Violence” isn’t abstract—it’s rooted in lived experience. For Mutinta, a Black, queer, trans woman from Zambia living in Quebec, existence itself is political. She acknowledges this without letting it become the whole story.
Dark humour threads through the album too, cutting through the heaviness in unexpected ways. Video game references and mundane daily complaints punctuate the existential dread, grounding everything in messy reality. These moments—the throwaway lines, the flickers of reluctant hope—make Only Dust Remains feel devastatingly human.
Backxwash will celebrate the album’s release at Société des arts technologiques (SAT) in Montreal on April 18. Every time I’ve seen her live, it’s been astonishing. More ritual than concert—a collective processing of grief and survival that leaves everyone changed.
Ultimately, Only Dust Remains doesn’t wrap up trauma with a neat bow. Mutinta offers no easy answers, no inspirational platitudes. What she does instead is far more valuable—she stays. She creates. She bears witness.
Only Dust Remains is released March 28
Photos – Méchant Vaporwave
Share this :
