Backxwash’s previous album, the Polaris-winning God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It, ends with a benediction. Over a serene loop of breezy guitar and tender hums that wouldn’t be out of place on a MIKE record, the rapper and producer samples a recording of the pastor T.D. Jakes, as if inviting the people who have forsaken her to forgive themselves. Backxwash tends to tuck such moments of warmth and reprieve into the margins of her raucous, blistering music, but “Redemption” is forthright, an olive branch extended to an undeserving world. On her third album, she’s uninterested in reconciliation. I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES embraces wrath, cranking up the murk and intensity of Backxwash’s snarling nu-metal to reveal the relief within unbridled anger.
God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It raised Backxwash’s profile, but because the album was laced with uncleared samples, she was forced to withdraw it from streaming services. That setback seems to have pushed her toward a less rap-first approach to songwriting. Instead of riding the drums and bass, here she adopts a slower, breathier delivery that thunders over the percussion. She trades drum loops and recognizable samples in favor of layered production with tighter pockets and denser mixes. These shifts produce heavier, more suffocating music, a backdrop that fits her tales of manic benders and grim ideation.
The record oscillates between Backxwash resisting the relentless current of her thoughts and surrendering herself to it. “Wail of the Banshee,” a frank litany of self-harm, is the latter. “Look in the mirror, it’s telling me I should kill something,” she raps over a thick wall of drone and screams. “Terror Packets” is equally despondent as Backxwash and guest Censored Dialogue relay personal brushes with transphobia, many involving relatives or romantic partners. “I am just dick to these hoes,” Backxwash growls, the double entendre pointed. The song ends with a clip of Angela Davis detailing how constant surveillance foments explosive rage.
Backxwash’s rage takes an array of shapes: Sometimes it’s destructive, as on “Burn to Ashes,” where guilt trips flare into fantasies of self-immolation. On the self-produced “In Thy Holy Name,” anger is jet fuel. Placed after a sample of a homophobic pastor, Backxwash’s final verse grows denser and craggier, then spills into a cathartic gurgle of noise and distortion. It feels like she’s run out of words. On “666 in Luxaxa,” the instrumental channels her fury. Rapping over a sample of a ululating Zulu chant, Backxwash, who grew up in Lusaka, Zambia, gives a quick lesson in colonization, allowing the loop to act as a marker of what empire erased. It’s also a subtle monument to Black resilience: When Backxwash’s bleak verse ends, the loop endures.
I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES has an introspective bent that distinguishes it from more cathartic pairings of rap and industrial music. While rappers as varied as Rico Nasty, Playboi Carti, Kanye West, and El-P have sought harsher sounds to unspool themselves and tap into spontaneity, Backxwash’s embrace of chaos and rage is meditative. Many of these songs attempt to both articulate anger and harness it in the name of self-acceptance—as well as more elusive feelings, like transcendence and euphoria. Backxwash’s sneering use of religious imagery demonstrates her deep skepticism of this impulse, but it’s a fixture of her music, buoying her when she careens toward rock bottom and propelling her when peace is just within her grasp.
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