Cyst - ᲘᲘ

The title is pronounced "rabbit." The cover shows a young couple, struggling, with a baby in a shopping bag and a dog at their feet. The tracks are called "Dog Shit," "Needle," "Pest," and "Knackered." Whatever Cyst are doing, they are not trying to flatter you.

The duo is Iglooghost and daisy* (formerly BABii), both Bristol-based, both with existing profiles in the weirder corners of UK electronic music. Their debut as Cyst is built around a very specific obsession: a brief window in the early 2000s when experimental hip-hop and IDM crossed paths before each retreated back to its own territory. Anti-Pop Consortium, Anticon, Def Jux, Prefuse 73, Dabrye, Techno Animal. A moment when glitch textures and abrasive, off-kilter rap production were genuinely in conversation rather than being forced together by a curator's whim. Iglooghost and daisy* have listened to that moment very carefully, and then filtered it through everything that came after.

The result is something Bandcamp Daily's Joe Muggs neatly describes as "a blunter, less poetic, more provincial version of Burial's sad-city soundscapes, by way of Iglooghost's hyperactive glitchcore and daisy*'s eerie hyperpop." That's an accurate triangulation. There's Burial's rain-slicked melancholy and his instinct for vocal fragments as texture, but none of his abstraction or his tendency toward the romantic. This is more granular, more municipal. The emotional register is frustration and low-level dread, shot through with a very British, very deadpan dark humour.

The album operates inside what internet discourse has called the "UK poo" aesthetic, a loose but recognisable strand of British rap and adjacent music that leans into the grotty, the grubby, the anti-aspirational. Late-night corner shops, housing block stairwells, arguments conducted at low volume in public spaces. Muggs draws a comparison to "Eleanor Rigby" and The Faces' "Lazy Sunday," portraits of ordinary British life made visionary through specificity, and it lands. There's that same quality of the mundane being documented so precisely it tips into surrealism.

Sonically, the album moves between Iglooghost's hyperactive production instincts, all stuttering percussion and bitcrushed textures, and daisy*'s capacity for hooks that feel slightly wrong, slightly off-centre, like a pop melody played back on a cassette that's been left in a hot car. "Needle" is where the drum and bass and jungle lineages surface most clearly, those rhythms not deployed as nostalgia but as a reminder that this music has been embedded in British culture long enough to feel like furniture. The track is uncomfortable and propulsive in equal measure.

What holds it together is a coherent worldview. This is an album with things to say about what it feels like to live in provincial Britain right now, and while it says them through clatter and distortion rather than lyrics, the communication is oddly precise. The grotty details aren't wallowing; they're observation. The aesthetic of grime and decay is handled with the same care a documentary photographer brings to unflattering material, seeing clearly without either condemning or romanticising what's in front of them.

As a debut it's impressively sure of itself. Both artists bring defined individual voices that somehow cohere rather than cancel each other out, and the record never feels like a collaboration in the weak sense of two people taking turns. ᲘᲘ has its own metabolism. It's abrasive, funny in a way you can't quite point to, and quietly sad underneath all the noise. Rabbit, indeed.