Backxwash, 'Only Dust Remains' Album Review

Backxwash Interrogates Paradoxes, Mental Illness and Injustice on Only Dust Remains

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Only Dust Remains is an aftermath. True to its title, the record’s 10 songs abandon gentleness, as Backxwash, the stage name of Zambia-born, Montreal-based rapper-producer Ashanti Mutinta, asks loud questions that demand loud answers. Her trilogy of releases between 2020 and 2022—the Polaris Prize-winning God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It and its follow-ups, I Lie Here Buried With My Rings and My Dresses and His Happiness Shall Come First Even Though We Are Suffering—were suspended in the gray area between catharsis and skepticism, illustrating rock bottom and the high-heavens as one and the same. Only Dust Remains lingers in the afterword of its three predecessors.

Mutinta’s music so often oscillates between terrifying, liberating, queer, faith-driven and faith-questioning worlds—caught someplace in-between the self-immolating, blood-curdling divinity of Lingua Ignota, the gaunt ambience of Anna von Hausswolff and the harsh, unfurling bravado of Rico Nasty while experimenting with drone (“Wail of Banshee”), screamo (“TERROR PACKETS”), Zulu chants (“666 in Luxaxa”), post-rock (“DISSOCIATION”) and horrorcore (“Kumoto”) styles. On Only Dust Remains, she conjures everything from the meta-existentialism of Moor Mother, to the prog-rap of Young Fathers, digital intricacies of clipping., and Yeezus levels of damp, brash Auto-Tune. The perspective repeatedly switches between micro and macro, as Backxwash, ever the intergenerational, socio-political magician in rap, casts a spell on Black trans life through gothic, scorched-earth overtures, unpredictable pop tangents and prompt lyrical critiques of global corruption and genocide.

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Vicious lead single “Wake Up,” which made an appearance on Paste’s year-end list in December, boils for seven minutes and lends itself to the testimonies of trauma. Loud, swirling and complex samples collapse into a terrifying overture, where Mutinta shouting “WAKE THE FUCK UP!” over and over becomes an instrument added into the mess. Nearly five minutes into “Wake Up,” the melody flips, awakening a chopped-and-screwed gospel sample. Mutinta, bed-bound and deteriorating (“The ceiling is all gaze as I rot away”) into visions of suicide (“‘Cause for now I’ll just divvy the rope and I’ll see if it holds”), near-death defiance (“Throught the blackened skies, I will not go gentle”) and misery (“The Lord forsaketh in awful places, I’m dealing with loss of days”), turns her suffering into a crash-out crescendo.

“9th Heaven” is an electric squash of anxiety, as Backxwash’s flow stretches around a crying vocal sample. She reckons with labor, drugs and purpose. Piano notes twirl like pirouettes, as she summons a “drummer coming,” programming beats into a Biblical ecstasy evoked through mentions of the archangel Gabriel and Adam eating the apple. The tempo grows, as Backxwash chants, “I know where I’ve been, and I don’t know where the fuck I’m going.” “But I can tell you one motherfucking thing, I feel so motherfucking free!” I’m hesitant to call “9th Heaven” a rap song; I’m not so sure that could possibly categorize or encapsulate the magic and craft throbbing and shape-shifting within. Let’s call it like it is instead: “9th Heaven” is a museum.

A synth begins like a lullaby on “History of Violence” before patiently building into an armor of metal drums and Michael Go’s thrashing guitars. “Is Heaven the only semblance of peace?,” Mutinta asks. The song is not just a reflection of her own political climate-inciting agony, or an uncomfortable interrogating of cultural abuse, but an annihilation on global power, corruption and gluttony; Backxwash prosecutes the fascists enabling the ongoing genocide in Gaza, shouting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” She condemns the world’s leaders using freedom as a bartering chip; she recalls videos of dying Palestinian children and reckons with what power fuels a slaughtering of innocent children: “These fuckers gonna say it’s all about peace. Check the stats, motherfucker, it’s all about greed.”

“Black Lazarus” momentarily shrinks Backxwash’s focus back onto herself, as she raps about suicide and references George Michael and Michael Jackson in her sample-driven screenplay. Metallic, hulking drums smack against the chorale refrain, as her gaze returns to Israel’s mass-murdering of Palestinians. “Why the fuck am I complaining here?” Mutinta asks. “When there’s kids in Gaza with a missing father?” The melody rarely breaks, yet Mutinta’s rapping grows louder and angrier with each elapsing bar. “Pray for me,” she yells, as a Weeknd-style synth arrangement barely cuts through the soupy, distorted static. “But ain’t nobody here savin’ me.”

The “9th Gate” and “Love After Death” interludes are angular strokes of electronica colored by stray touches of piano. The latter is especially graceful, as a woman speaks about “the question of love” being “the question of what to do,” talking about the ingredients of loving someone and how human beings must turn caregiving, knowledge, trust and respect into reflective values. “Stairway to Heaven” is as rooted in hauntological R&B as it is Led Zeppelin, as Backxwash raps over a jazz instrumental that quickly mutates into a classic rock guitar solo from Go. “Do not fear the void!” Mutinta warns us, like a doomsday preacher quelling worry as swift death approaches. “It is not your enemy!”

The enemy, Backxwash argues on “Only Dust Remains,” is the “racist and idiots” she’s pointing a middle finger towards. The album’s title track is both a psalm and a coda, as Mutinta raps about having the face of an immigrant, leaving loved ones behind, meeting God without a reverend and “penny-pinching for trust.” She rhymes “bent knees to the gut” with “Hennessey in the cup,” before the song gives way to softness. “My thing, what I hope to do all the time, is to be so completely myself,” the voice of Nina Simone cuts in. “That’s what I hope I am.” The pianos are emboldened, a pitch-shifted voice illegibly hums through bounding drums and crushing, breathy ambience, and a gospel choir conducted by Pet Wife dissolves into a wellspring of clapping hands and dainty, teardrop keys.

Only Dust Remains is Backxwash’s most conventional album yet, but its resistance and expansiveness are never sacrificed. These songs are caustic, knotty monoliths, and Mutinta bedecks her sacrifices with challenging, orchestrated resignations; the occultic, unsettled energy of her previous releases gets substituted with potent electronic abstraction. Her ferocity finds clarity as she grapples with self-worth on “9th Heaven,” PTSD on “Wake Up” and shame on “Undesirable.” “I don’t think I’m an addict, I’m just really unhappy,” she contends with an assist from Chloe Hotline on “DISSOCIATION,” in-between the walls of a sitcom laugh-track; “I’m going out like a bitch, the trumpet and the horns. The drummer is coming,” she declares on “9th Heaven.” As it’s written on Backxwash’s Bandcamp page, “these are the songs of a person who was brought back to life but is now haunted by death itself.”

And that death itself is what plagues the mortal coil. It’s in performative activism, in lineal trauma and tragedy, in the war machine eradicating cultures, in internalized and externalized oppression, in “fak[ing] the scars for your bleeding.” “You’ll have no control over how they remember you,” Backxwash raps, and therein lies the injustice of suffering: Even in the pursuit of love, humanity will always be collateral damage under the boot of fascism; abuse will always contour the paradoxes of living.

Read: “Backxwash: The Best of What’s Next”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

Backxwash Interrogates Paradoxes, Mental Illness and Injustice on Only Dust Remains

The songs on the Montreal rapper-producer’s fifth album are caustic, knotty monoliths, as she bedecks her sacrifices with challenging, orchestrated, and cathartic resignations.