Backxwash - Only Dust Remains
Ugly Hag Records
Released on March 28th, 2025
Having made her way through her critically acclaimed trilogy of albums, Montreal-based Zambian-Canadian industrial rapper and producer Backxwash (aka. Ashanti Mutinta) returns with a brand new record. Teasing the album with tracks such as the expansive epic of “Wake Up” and the industrial dreamscape of “9th Heaven,” Only Dust Remains has been one of the most anticipated albums of 2025.
The album features Backxwash’s usual team including creative direction by Méchant Vaporwave (aka. Chachi Revah), mixing by Will Owen Bennett, and mastering by Richard Addison (aka. Trillium Sound) which flesh out the world that Backxwash builds with her lyrical prowess and sound design into a creative experience unlike any other. The album also includes new creative input and support from Sarah Harris’ recording engineering as well as the features by other incredible musicians such as Chloe Hotline (a long-awaited collaboration for me personally), Ora Cogan, and pet wife, Magella, Fernie and Morgan Paige in the titular closing track.
The album tells a story about a person who was brought back to life but is now haunted by death itself. The album starts with a twist on biblical storytelling with “Black Lazarus” which delves into the meaning of life and death as the protagonist tethers around the liminal edge between them, often time reflecting on the disregard of Black and oppressed life abjected into nonsensical death and violence — making allusions to the extrajudicial deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd, each of them reverberating in the emergence and later resurgence of Black Lives Matter, as well as the constant assault on the people of Gaza, Congo, and South Sudan under the lasting effects of colonial, neocolonial, and imperial violence. The contrast between the protagonist’s found meaning and life in self-destruction, the grief of this history of violence remains a stark reminder of what’s at stake in life in a world where decrying systematic violence and injustice is treated as taboo and even criminal — a theme which gets an in-depth treatment in “History of Violence” repeated by the reiterative lyricism following the lines “From the river to the sea…” and “Never mention the fascists / Never mention the bad shit.”
Among my favorite tracks, I would mention the beautifully dreamy “DISSOCIATION” with some of the best vocals by Chloe Hotline (a young musician and producer that Backxwash has been hyping up for years now along with CENSORED dialogue), the reflective “Stairway to Heaven” featuring glossy background vocals by Ora Cogan, and the titular closing track which is stacked with incredible features by the likes of pet wife, Magella, Fernie and Morgan Paige and which feature some of Backxwash’s most succinct lyrics: “I got the face of a immigrant / Some people love how I’m erased of my innocence / They're quick to judge how I'm too brazen and ignorant / So middle finger to these racist and idiots.”
The question was left hanging at the end of the former trilogy: what would a new Backxwash release look like after that set of releases? The answer that the album offers is a reconstruction of Backxwash sound prior to God Has Nothing To Do With This informed by the accomplishments of the last decade of her musical career. In many ways, the sound palette evokes the softer melodic and gospel sounds featured in her 2018 album Black Sailor Moon given how much of Only Dust Remains deviates from some of the harsher and more industrial metal inspirations that were introduced since Deviancy (2019). Thematically, the album is unyieldingly critical and focused in a way that clears the way for future Backxwash releases.
