Blawan - Sickelixir

SickElixir is Blawan's debut for XL Recordings, fourteen tracks built between Berlin, Leeds, Paris, and Lisbon that push his industrial techno somewhere more personal than usual.

Jamie Roberts started as a drummer in Barnsley before Fram, his 2010 debut on Hessle Audio, announced him as one of the sharpest producers in a scene just starting to rediscover industrial techno's clank and stomp. He's spent the years since running his own Ternesc label, collaborating with Pariah as Karenn and with Surgeon as Trade, and steadily pushing his solo work further into modular synthesis and genuinely strange territory across EPs like Dismantled Into Juice. This record is where all of it converges, grief and family upheaval processed through sound rather than explained by it.

The GL Lights opens the album with the clanking, mechanical percussion that's always been his signature, colder and more disorienting than most techno bothers to get. Rabbit Hole, featuring Monstera Black, brings in a vocal presence that cuts through the usual instrumental austerity, and Birf Song is the record's strangest detour, barely holding together in a way that feels deliberate. The title track closes things at its most emotionally direct, the concept finally naming itself.

Fourteen tracks of a producer known for restraint finally letting something messier through. It suits him.

Tracklist

1. The GL Lights
2. NOS
3. Weirdos United
4. Rabbit Hole
5. WTF
6. Casch
7. Birf Song
8. During Elevation
9. Don't Worry We Happy
10. Style Teef
11. Sonkind
12. TCP Burn
13. Creature Brigade
14. SickElixir