Iceboy Violet found a lifeline in noise. They were 18 years old and making hip-hop beats influenced by Madlib and Dilla—satisfying enough on a formal level, perhaps, but there were deeper, more conflicted emotions that classic boom-bap couldn’t assuage. Their housemate, though, listened to noise music, and the two would sit up until 7 a.m., bathing in the chaos. “It was the only thing that could drown out the voice in my head,” they said. At the same time, they were delving into the sounds of grime, whose chest-puffed rage seemed to mask a deep well of anguish—“all this pain that’s kept hidden by the pressures of hyper-masculinity,” said Iceboy, who is nonbinary, in another interview.
On their debut mixtape, 2018’s wild, bracing MOOK, they brought those two strains of music together—burying Dizzee Rascal samples in cavernous reverb, looping snippets of homophobic MC taunts over concussive waves of bass, and whipping white noise into corrosive whirlwinds. Not until the final track, woven from delicate filaments of drone, did they reveal their own rapping voice: a plaintive snarl, cracked and swollen. “Father, father/Why won’t you unburden me/My chest feels heavy/Can’t breathe,” they pleaded, sounding as though a foreign mass were lodged in their throat.
Since that shot across the bow, Iceboy Violet has continued to shape their voice into a peerless instrument. They contributed a handful of guest features to artists like Loraine James and aya, and on last year’s The Vanity Project mixtape, they explored new cadences and registers over beats by likeminded producers that stirred drill, ambient, grime, and noise into an ominous miasma of melted textures. Not a Dream but a Controlled Explosion is the first project to fully combine Iceboy’s rapping with their own production, and if it is less noisy than MOOK—marginally, anyway—it is no less cathartic, and no less unusual. It’s a major step forward for the artist.
The album opens with a fake-out: a half minute of synth shimmer and crystalline pinging, as gentle and ethereal as Fennesz, before an overdriven, drill-inspired beat breaks through with the force of an earthmover. Blending sensuousness with violence, this is the palette that will carry across the whole record: thundering, distorted 808 kicks; clouds of vaporous tone color; bass frequencies that smolder like a mine fire, sucking all the oxygen out of the mix. “Black Gold” borrows the choral pads of so-called weightless grime and tips them toward chilly, mid-’90s ambient techno; “Refracted” pairs deadweight drums with ghostly wails before trailing off into an a cappella phrase of almost liturgical grace. The production is so enveloping that an instrumental version of the album would not seem to be missing anything at all.