I, a person who should know better, have spent several days walking around polite society frequently singing “Alice” under my breath within earshot of others:

Irresistible, addictive, euphoric, fun as hell. Bassvictim is Maria Manow on vocals and Ike Clateman on production. They’re from London, and their unpredictable, bass-forward electro sound would have been a perfect fit for DFA records in 2005 or so.

But they’re proabably too smart for that. From this profile in unsound:

Their sound … was initially a reaction born from their dissatisfaction with the scene at large. But take a listen to ‘Basspunk’, the duo’s debut EP that emerged on their own label in Spring, and you won’t find any bitterness, just a supple selection of forward-facing, genre-agnostic pop.

And what a sound. It’s at times reminiscent of Sleigh Bells, Underworld, Shelf Lives and Featurette, but the sound is fully their own. “Air on my G-String” has echoes of “Losing My Edge“, conversational, funny lyrics that sound ad-libbed with a detached vocal delivery:

They’ve been releasing music since 2023, and their debut EP Basspunk came out in April of this year. The record is full of wild ideas and experiments that sound like an act ready to break out in a big way.

Yesterday Byline published this interview of Clateman by his twin brother, and it’s got lots of gems in it:

…Maria was standing there. She’d just got back from Poland. I said, “Do you wanna be in a bass house project called Bassvictim where I produce and you do vocals.” And she was like yea. And I said, cool let’s try it out. And I did this beat with my mouth, and she started toasting over it and we were like, alright, this will work. There’s actually a recording of it that one day the world will be ready for. The next day we made our first song, “Air On a G-String.”

Here’s “Flop”, another one that’s a regular in the car since I first heard it:

This video of a live performance from August in NYC is bonkers — they come off like a rock band, and the crod eats it up. It also contains three unreleased songs, which sound both fully different and perfectly aligned with what they’ve released today.

At 10:10 someone asks the camera operator “How are you staying so still?”

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