When Denzel Himself was a child, he and his dad would drive around listening to reggae. The speakers in their car were shit and the 23-year-old musician remembers the rattling bass with fondness. “It’s my favourite sound ever — distorted bass from cars,” an eyebrowless Denzel tells me in between sips of the dark green juice he instantly regrets ordering. “It’s a nostalgia that influences my approach to production; almost like a personal homage to that memory.” This is audible in the dark, persistently agitated music that sits beneath his guttural flows. “My only rule is that it cannot be predictable,” he confirms. “I like lagged but controlled grooves… for people to still be able to nod their heads or dance.”
Denzel pulls in influences from all angles — merging the classic Nollywood films he was raised on with Japanese horror, Jehnny Beth performing live with Savages, and the hardcore scene he immersed himself in as a teen — to honour the lineage of the art he loves yet make something entirely his own. “The way I quantify it is, if someone was playing this song in a car at a traffic light, how compelled would the listener be to knock on the window and ask what it is?” A very good question.
Naturally, for someone who started recording music the same year he began directing (his seventeenth, which also happens to be the same year that he got into hardcore and a straight edge lifestyle), his various creative outputs inspire one another. “It’s cross-sensory to me,” he explains.“They inspire one another by proxy. I’ll always be a hardcore kid at heart.” His debut album Pleasure quietly introduced the music world to his sound back at the start of 2017, before he dropped shake-up singles like Bangin’ and Chevi, the schizophrenic track whose video we premiered just over a year ago. These were swiftly followed by the impression-making Baphomet James EP and its stand-out track, Melty, featuring his friend and collaborator KEYAH/BLU.
Confronted with the task of performing to a highbrow Danish art crowd in the courtyard of a 19th century palace during Copenhagen Art Fair this summer, Denzel did what nobody else would do. He started a pit. And it went down surprisingly well. “I try to honour my initial mission,” he tells me. “I always wanted the craziest live show, but observing hip-hop’s recent fetishisation of rock culture, I feel as though I’ve refined the experience. It’s not just rooted in being wild for the sake of it. It’s very intense, but with a numinous understanding of the energy; everyone unspokenly sharing a commonality because of the music. It’s a gathering.” He doesn’t get nervous, he says, because when he performs, he’s not the same Denzel. “Day to day, I like to fly under the radar, but when I perform I can be a caricature of my feelings and expressions.”
Post EP release and mid endless UK summer, our new pal found himself playing festival after festival and began to feel that, in comparison to the rush he gets when performing, a lot of his music is quite slow. “I decided that I wanted my future output to be more adrenaline-inducing and immediate. I want it to be like cocaine when you listen to it.” Which brings us to Denzel’s brand new double A-side singles, BE THERE / HIGHER, out today on Glasgow indie label LuckyMe. Both tracks are very, very good. “I really enjoy the idea of presenting a body of work that’s like a duality and a dichotomy in itself,” he says. “I wanted both songs to sound and feel like Mad Max.”
The production is more electronic and progressive than his past work. Things have stepped up a notch and you can feel the days and weeks that Denzel spent working away at his laptop, soaking up the intense chase scenes, the extreme sports footage, the videos of dirt bikes. If BE THERE is riding a death buggy through the desert, then HIGHER takes things nocturnal and hands you an open can of Monster energy drink. The music video for the latter, as ever, has been directed by Denzel Himself and is a brilliant screenshot of where the artist is right now. Launching straight into madness, we join our photogenic protagonist in a dried up field near his house; steering wheel in hand, bouncing erratically. The outsider makes warped references to fire, war rigs, the desert wasteland of the film. It’s impressive.
Make you feel weird? He wants you to. It wasn’t long ago that he posted an Instagram story about the responsibility he feels to make his art uncomfortable for small-minded individuals to consume. “I guess it’s along the lines of the idea that art is supposed to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed,” Denzel tells me, smiling. “That art and expression can offer a lot of personal growth; that there’s a high merit in allowing the person experiencing it to adopt a different lens and look at themselves differently.” Looking at himself differently, the fictional character he most relates to is Doctrine Dark from Street Fighter X Alpha 2, a spy who followed his general into war before being abandoned by him, having his jaw broken off and becoming permanently shell-shocked. “He’s stylised with this ventilator thing over his mouth and constantly shell-shocked eyes,” he says. “I feel quite the opposite actually. I feel quite desensitised because of things that I’ve experienced. But afterwards, he’s super fucking focussed all the time.” Denzel’s right there with him, riding eternal.
Denzel Himself’s BE THERE / HIGHER is out now on LuckyMe.
