Shygirl — London artist and co-founder of the NUXXE collective — has long been the sharpest voice in the city’s experimental-club underground, and ALIAS is the record that carried that sound out of the warehouse and onto a major label. Her second EP, released via Because Music in partnership with NUXXE, it arrives with a production roster that reads like a who’s who of the scene’s avant-garde: SOPHIE, Sega Bodega, Kai Whiston, Happa and Karma Kid. That ALIAS never once feels like a compromise is the miracle of it — these seven tracks are as strange, as rude and as thrilling as anything the underground has produced in years.
The Sega Bodega fingerprints are all over opener TWELVE, all springy UK-funky percussion and a bassline that walks the line between grime and house, Shygirl’s voice pitched and chopped into syllables of pure attitude. SLIME follows a similar blueprint — minimal, almost skeletal, a viscous sub-bass and a verse delivered with the kind of dead-eyed confidence that makes you check your own posture.
FREAK is the bluntest statement of intent: a jacking industrial-club groove with stabs like a car alarm and a hook that lands somewhere between come-on and challenge. TASTY is the subtlest track on the record, all clipped, off-kilter percussion and a melody that unfolds slowly, Shygirl’s delivery so measured you’d think she’d rehearsed it in the mirror.
ALIAS is Shygirl's second EP for her NUXXE imprint.
The back half turns meaner. LENG is pure grime swagger with a twist of industrial dread, while BAWDY — the filthiest thing here — rattles and clangs like a chain dragged across a warehouse floor, its four-to-the-floor kick barely holding the chaos together.
And then there’s SIREN, which closes the EP with SOPHIE’s production — a ferocious, hyperkinetic blast of metallic percussion and pitch-shifted vocals that pivot between ecstatic and threatening in a single bar. It’s a reminder of a genius who can make the ugliest sounds feel like the most beautiful things in the world.
At nineteen minutes, ALIAS is over almost before you’ve registered what happened, and that’s precisely the point. Seven tracks, each with its own personality, none outstaying its welcome — an EP that took the London experimental-club underground to the mainstream without dulling a single edge. It remains a landmark of the scene, and an essential document of a moment that changed everything.
