TisaKorean’s breakout track “Dip” was one of 2018’s most bizarre works. Over a wonky, dissonant loop, Tisa hyper articulates raunchy minimalist verses with a cadence that drags across the beat. “Uber to my d***” is perhaps the most memorable line in a song that has only a few, though “Just like iCloud baby, I need my own space” is a contender. Later, Tisa makes his noncommittal intentions abundantly clear, articulating a uniquely lurid Morton’s Fork: “It can go two ways / I am going to f*** / Then I am going to dip / or I am going to f*** / Then I am going to dip.”
The music’s almost brutal sparseness ratchets up the tension, and depending on your estimation, it’s either a slice of sublime lowbrow brilliance or an emperor’s new clothes scam. One YouTube commenter, writing this year, called it “Literally️ 🗑️. Dumped a dude for playing this song in my presence.” But many, many others disagree. The 1:58 song has received over 18 million streams on Spotify alone, and it’s not even close to being TisaKorean’s biggest hit.
Streams aren’t the only barometer, though, and repeat listens to any of TisaKorean’s best tracks reveals a slippery, Escher-esque dimensionality that has a hypnotic allure. “Crash The Party” loops two haunting piano notes and some barely-there drum programming in an act of defiant emptying-out that needs to be heard to be believed. Tisa’s vocal contortions bounce between syrupy confidence, grotesque menace and rubbery mugging. The track’s thousand-yard-stare vacantness elevates the mood, landing somewhere between the claustrophobia of Ligeti’s “Musica Ricercata” and DJ Screw. You keep waiting for it to start, and then it just ends. The video, meanwhile, posits that music this disquieting and unnerving should soundtrack a jovial game of beer pong.
In recent years, TisaKorean has filled out his tracks and grown into a more full-bodied version of his core sound. 2022’s “PASTA,” with Mighty Bay, is more legible to a wider hip-hop audience, while remaining appropriately unhinged and sex-obsessed. The heaving, distorted 808 kicks and kinetic rapping give the track a raucous bounce that’s hard to ignore. It’ll sit well next to 100 gecs’ moshy “Dumbest Girl Alive,” which marries Ozzy-esque ‘80s guitars with huge trap beats to create a new form of rap-metal.
Liturgy also flirted with rap-metal on 2015’s “The Ark Work,” but the group is incapable of sounding like anything other than themselves. This is a good thing. The long-term project of Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, Liturgy’s journey has moved from self-described Transcendental Black Metal into a remarkably unique hybrid of live and electronic approaches to create a new devotional music. “All the music is about God,” she told Popmatters this spring. “It’s sacred music, and that’s why it’s called Liturgy."
The group’s breakout LP “Aesthetica” was an undeniable statement, pushing black metal out of its comfort zone with a searing, proggy intensity. It also introduced many listeners to the virtuosic drumming of Greg Fox, whose perfection of the band’s signature Burst Beat refreshed the quadruple-timed Blast Beat, a rhythmic staple, for the first time in years. However, the band was regularly dismissed and lambasted within metal circles for being too cerebral, too theoretical, too self-serious. Hendrix’s manifesto “Transcendental Black Metal” set the group up as outsiders:
“The will to power has two stages. The first may be called Fortification; the establishment of a paradigm or set of rules and the ensuing exploration of potential that lies within those constraints. The second stage may be termed Sacrifice; an auto-destruction, a self-overcoming whereby the initial rules, having been fully digested and satisfied, are thereby mutilated. They are transformed into the basis for something new and unprecedented. Transcendental Black Metal is black metal in the mode of Sacrifice.”
If conservative metal tribalists were all too ready to oblige the group’s self-othering, Liturgy’s outsider-ness has given them remarkable freedom to craft one outstanding album after another. They continue to advance their own sonic vocabulary without the limitations required for approval from the orthodoxy. “Liturgy is a pretty singular thing,” Hendrix said. “I have friends who make music that is cutting edge, and I feel like there’s something shared there, but Liturgy is quite an unmoored kind of project.”
This is nowhere more apparent than on their new album “93696,” which combines haunting nods to Early Music, severe digital glitching, arrangements that call to mind late-romantic symphonies and towering, blistering metal. Fundamentally rooted in the high speed immolations and downcast mood of traditional Scandinavian black metal, Liturgy uses that jumping off point for a sprawling work that sounds completely free and masterfully executed. “A big part of the intention in Liturgy generally is to create meaning, or create some kind of reference point for thriving and vitality and freedom, in a situation where a lot of the structures that have divided that stuff in the past are dissolving. That’s something I think about a lot, trying to make music that has a healing and inspiring effect, and drawing attention to it and conveying ideas that might be useful.”