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4 hours ago
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You could easily read Steady as I Am, from John Glacier’s debut album, as a mission statement. “I’m sticking to the plan, not the game,” the rapper offers. “Think I’m crazy, ’cause you’re all the same.” In a genre characterised by flash, Glacier cuts a unique figure, her USP a kind of wilful obfuscation. She doesn’t reveal her real name – the space where it should be on her Instagram bio is instead filled by the word “NO” – nor her age: she once told the Guardian she was “20,000” years old. She first attracted attention with a SoundCloud page, filled with snippets of music she had given shrugging, prosaic titles: A Child Was Sad So I Made This in Front of Her to Make Her Laugh; Sounds From Friday Evening. Said snippets have long been deleted, but a fragmentary, demo-like quality has clung to her releases ever since: the 12 short tracks on her 2022 mixtape Shiloh: Lost for Words played out in a mass of muffled synth tones and distorted samples.
More than one critic has compared the effect of her vocal style – occasional bursts of brisk lyricism separated by sections in which she incants the same phrases over and over, as if in a stoned daze – to overhearing someone’s scattered voice memos. On Like a Ribbon, even her most pugilistic lines – “I’m the hottest in the game”; “I don’t give a fuck, let the people talk”; “now they’re calling me a bitch – best believe it” – are delivered in an oddly blank tone, as if she’s muttering them to herself, unaware that anyone’s listening. Elsewhere, her lyrics have a stream-of consciousness effect, a splurge of words written to try to work out how she feels – or perhaps just because she likes the way they sound together: “Like a satellite in the dark / In the night / Whereabouts in the clouds like a kite / Floating in the winds let the birds float by,” runs a characteristic line on opener Satellites.
The album’s sound, meanwhile, ranges in style from booming electronics to shaky, lo-fi piano samples – the latter on the Sampha-featuring Ocean Steppin’ – but its cornerstone sound is an electric guitar, artlessly played, as if picking through the pattern that opens the album or the vaguely Pixies-like riff on Money Shows for the first time. It’s the kind of idiosyncratic approach around which cult followings are built, and one is duly building around Glacier: she’s now signed to Young, home of the xx and FKA twigs; a succession of fashion designers have called upon her services as a model. You can see why: Like a Ribbon is entirely enthralling.
Its 30 minutes are so packed with ideas, it’s quite hard to take in on one listen, and so rewards repeat plays. There are big, nagging earworms: the echoing, glacial riff that runs through Emotions is hugely addictive, so is Nevasure’s beautiful synth pattern. The beats boast the influence not just of hip-hop, but UK garage, grime and drum’n’bass, and invariably wrap around the rest of the music in unexpected ways, their accents never landing where you automatically assume they will. They’re part of a teeming mass of mysterious sounds: the glitching, incomprehensible voices that interrupt Satellites; the murky pool of slowed-down samples beneath Steady as I Am; the solitary distressing scream that suddenly appears out of nowhere towards the end of Don’t Cover Me. Heaven’s Sent ends the album with a recording of a perplexing phone conversation over a fragile acoustic guitar figure. As a conclusion it feels both enigmatic and premature, meaning your immediate reaction is to play the whole thing again.
In the middle of Nevasure – a song that, like a lot of the album, deals with feelings of uncertainty – Glacier opens a verse with the words “Since I came to Earth …” It fits: the contents of Like a Ribbon seem pretty alien to anything else that’s currently happening in UK rap. If you were looking elsewhere for context, abstract US hip-hop collective Surf Gang appear on Dancing in the Rain; you could also file it somewhere in the region of Mica Levi or the weirder moments on Earl Sweatshirt’s Sick! But ultimately, Like a Ribbon really doesn’t sound much like anything else. As with her lyrics and their offhand delivery, it’s all genuinely intriguing: you could spend an awful lot of time trying to unpick what’s happening here and never really get to the bottom of it. But reaching conclusions doesn’t really matter: it’s clearly an album about the journey rather than the destination. John Glacier has constructed her own peculiar, alluring world: getting lost in it is a completely fascinating and engrossing experience.
This week Alexis listened to
Divorce – Antarctica
The opening track from Divorce’s forthcoming debut album: a pattering drum machine rhythm track, wobbly lo-fi guitar, beautiful vocal harmonies, a lovely song.
