Review
Monologues from writer Precious Okoyomon and artist Juliana Huxtable slice through a barrage of relentless kick drums on TYGAPAW's third LP. Conceived during the first year of the Brooklyn producer’s transition, the album confronts systemic violence with uncompromising, industrial-strength velocity.
This high-pitched urgency has polarized critics. Some find the record’s conceptual framing overly heavy-handed, writing it off as an "irritatingly didactic record" dominated by "insolent noise clattering away". Under this skeptical lens, the abrasive, hard-techno tempos offer far too few moments of narrative or melodic reprieve.
Yet, for other reviewers, this uncompromising aggression is precisely what makes it a "peerless work". The LP reaches its ecstatic goals on the "relentless" rhythms of "M32 Riddim" and the hypnotic, "stream of consciousness jams" that define the collaborations. By fusing Jamaican riddim heritage with brutalist techno, TYGAPAW constructs a "physical (not to say physiological)" club experience where anxiety and communal defiance are powerfully integrated.
