Blackhaine’s Saints in the Wethouse is an electrifying vision of a bruised headscape

As such a description implies, Blackhaine is a multi-faceted, ambitious artist. Born and raised in Preston, later becoming a key player at the legendary White Hotel venue in Salford, his futuristic rap is just one string to his avant-bow. He’s worked as a creative consultant for the likes of Playboi Carti, Fontaines D.C. and Bad Bunny, and is also an acclaimed dancer, drawing on the disturbing art of Butoh, Japan's post-war "dance of darkness." Unsurprisingly, his debut full-length is as rich, complex, and experimental as such a CV implies.

As he told i-D magazine in 2022, Blackhaine's artistic goal is to “turn the ordinary into something abstract,” and Saints in the Wethouse realises this vision through an extraordinary musical psycho-scape. In the album's world it’s perpetually 3am, sheets of Northern rain fall like panes of glass, tower block lights reflect in oily puddles, Ford Fiesta headlights pick out opps on the edge of A roads, pink-green synthetic drugs are heady knockout blows, sex is a cold formality, and club lights flicker like visions of unreachable angels.

The figure at the centre of these 12 tracks is tired and battered, with a bally and a North Face coat hiding his many bruises. He’s plagued by addiction, “drunk on the phone” while learning of a pregnancy on "Consumer" and drifting through neglected UK streets ("Valium"'s potent image of “slow [dancing] in a ghost town”). All the while he’s reckoning with the role that art has played in saving him, such as the crime-laden visions of "Pyrex" where he’s left with “nothing left to lose.”

Like the aforementioned novels of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet (an extraordinary collection of brutal '70s and '80s-set Northern crime novels), Blackhaine’s hinterland is defined by a grim opacity, where angular, abstract images of the past and present, himself and unnamed characters collide, like impenetrable rain against a luxury hotel window. The question that runs through Peace’s novels – can the world be as sad as it seems? – is mirrored by Saints in the Wethouse’s recurring image of being “born from a wound.” The album’s most transcendent track "Spirit" sees Blackhaine attempt to challenge this original sin, reckoning with “scars [that] ain’t healed,” searching around in angelic light (fallen angels are a recurring image in the Red Riding books), daring to “feel alive.”

As the album’s sonic architecture moves from pummelling, industrial, borderline free-form club beats, towards a more rapturous, atmospheric, but no less weight-laden back half, you feel like you’ve started to navigate your way through the downpour. However, the titular eight-minute closer then grabs your ankles and halts this ascent. Its harsh noise closing passage is a reminder that Blackhaine’s reality remains (for now, at least) here on the soaked streets, police lights blinding your vision, opaque chemicals blocking your nose, phone endlessly blowing up from unknown numbers, head scrambled by the past, present, and future.

The ordinary has become abstract and it’s visionary, electrifying, and downright troubling.