Hype Williams never made it easy. In an age where a cloak of mystery seems more rule than exception, Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland's (presumably) fake names and slippery interview tactics always felt like an altogether different beast. They somehow managed to combine total transparency with a shroud of secrecy; with all those obfuscations flying around, you could never be too sure where anything stood with them, even when they seemed to be giving it to you straight-up. Their music similarly existed in the cracks between genres: too out-there for post-dubstep, too amorphous for IDM. With no neatly packaged narrative to bounce off of, listeners had to seek answers in the music itself: no mean feat, when—much like its makers—that music never quite seemed to stay in one place long enough to wrap your head around it.
Copeland and Blunt parted ways in 2013, after the release of Black is Beautiful, a record that stripped away some—but certainly not all—of the willful obtusity of their previous shapeshifting. As Blunt offered up the Redeemer—a presumptive breakup record that sported some of the most straightforward, soul-baring music of his career—Inga Copeland issued the brief, bracing Don't Look Back, That's Not Where You're Going EP, an occasionally puzzling, frequently beguiling array of corroded electronics and clamorous calls-to-action. Now, Copeland's returned with her debut full-length, Because I'm Worth It, another strange, singular record that offers as many questions as it does answers. It's not an easy listen, but Copeland wouldn't have it any other way.
Opener "Faith OG X" begins with a discomfiting crackle of static. It's soon overtaken by a queasy, lurching synth, and then, two minutes in, a thought-swallowing, concentration-decimating beep. The effect of this incessant ping proves wildly disorienting; after a few spins, you'll learn to anticipate it, but you'll never quite get used to it. That's true for much of Because I'm Worth It, a nebulous, deviously off-kilter listen, impossible and intriguing in roughly equal measure, constantly rearranging itself for maximum discombobulation.
Over the whinny-and-pop of a door on a hinge, "Advice to Young Girls"—produced in conjunction with her fellow UK beatmangler Actress—finds Copeland in direct-address mode. "Sneak out the window and meet your friends on the corner," she urges. "Together, you're strong. You walk the streets: face the city, face the night. The city is yours." "Advice" is Worth It's finest hour, a near-perfect meeting of music and message; between Copeland's uncompromising aesthetic and her appeals to self-expression and sisterhood, "Advice" feels bold, urgent, necessary.
"Advice to Young Girls" is one of few vocal-centric tracks on Worth It; most of the rest is given over to Copeland's clattering, claustrophobic production. At barely half an hour, Because I'm Worth It is a dank, foreboding listen, a difficult space to accustom oneself to, at once enervating and intoxicating. The murky, pitched-down voice buried near the back of "Insult 2 Injury" is largely obscured by its sputtering rhythms and frosty synths, while the dank, zero-gravity dancehall of "Inga" finds her voice slathered in effects, rendering them half-incomprehensible. This is slippery, expectation-upending stuff; even after umpteen listens, you'll never quite feel as though you've acclimated yourself to the darkness.
There are moments—the morse code tappings of "Serious", the jolting beat and transmogrifying synths of closer "L'oreal"—that seem just little too hermetic, too impenetrable, lost down the hall of mirrors Copeland's built around them. And while the briefer pieces—"Serious," again, and the strange, sinewy "DILIGENCE"—help tie everything together, neither holds a candle to the denser, more enveloping darkness that surround them. Taken together, though, all these abstractions and interjections forge a dingy, disquieting dreamscape that seems to operate by its own laws of physics. The oft-bewildering Worth It is, like every record Copeland's put her name to, a deeply challenging, deliberately unorthodox listen. But you're not likely to hear another record quite like it anytime soon, and the impression it leaves isn't an easy one to shake.
