Blackhaine's Debut Is the Most Genuinely Disorienting UK Album in Years

Tom Heyes fuses UK drill, power electronics, and butoh-influenced performance art into something that shouldn't cohere — and mostly does. Saints in the Wethouse earns its difficulty.

Tom Heyes, performing as Blackhaine, made his name in the gap between dance performance and noise music — a gap most artists don't even know exists. His early EPs, particularly And Salford Falls Apart (2021), arrived sounding like accidents of genre rather than genre decisions: UK drill cadences over electronics that owed more to Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle than to any rap precedent. The question Saints in the Wethouse has to answer is whether that approach scales to a full album, or whether the intensity that made the EPs compelling becomes exhausting at length. It mostly scales. The album's most direct moments — Pyrex sits closest to conventional UK rap — are outnumbered by tracks that have genuinely slipped their genre moorings. 5 Days dispenses with rhythm entirely, setting Heyes's voice against punishing electronics and feedback squeal. Born from Wound [Floodlights] builds to a wall of noise that lands as either claustrophobic or cathartic depending entirely on where your head is when you press play. These are not rap songs with unusual production. They are something else. What holds the record together is Heyes's voice, and specifically the particular register he's found for it. He doesn't perform aggression — he performs desperation. The aggressive delivery of a cornered man yelling at gunpoint rather than a man asserting dominance. This recontextualizes the standard rap vocabulary of threats and boasts entirely: when he says 'do you even know you're fucking with a real one?' it reads not as swagger but as a plea for recognition. The Auto-Tune on Consumer doesn't glamorize — it destroys. It's one of the more genuinely despairing uses of pitch correction in recent memory. The Whitehouse comparison the reviewer reaches for is accurate but needs a qualifier: this isn't pure power electronics. The rave-y vocal sample on Northside Needs Me — 'jump, baby,' repeating over increasingly alarming lyrics about staring out tower windows — situates Heyes in a specifically northern English rave tradition that has its own relationship to working-class despair. The dance influence isn't decorative. The butoh connection and the synthetic cannabis reference aren't biographical color. They're structural: the music performs a particular kind of impaired, dissociated movement through the world. The acoustic ballad The Wind, arriving without warning out of the noise of Born from Wound [Floodlights], is a smart risk. It has an unexpectedly pretty melody. It doesn't function as relief — the surrounding darkness has contaminated it by the time it arrives, and it ends up feeling creepy rather than calming. That's genuinely difficult to achieve: mood so total it absorbs formal contrast rather than being broken by it. The XL Recordings signing and the Wraith9 executive production credit raise a reasonable question about whether the platform pressure softened anything. The answer appears to be: not much. The record is still far from the mainstream. The Kanye and Playboi Carti connections, and the Venice Biennale presentations, suggest an artist whose work operates successfully across extreme registers — gallery, stage, club, album — without being diluted by any of them. That's unusual. Saints in the Wethouse is not an easy listen and doesn't want to be. It's an experience with a specific cost — it will wring you out, as the Guardian's Alexis Petridis puts it — and a specific reward: the rare feeling that someone has found a genuinely new way to make northern working-class despondency audible. Whether that's worth 40-odd minutes of your attention depends entirely on your appetite for discomfort.