SUAHN - Distort Everything Forever

There's a particular kind of electronic album that announces itself not as entertainment but as weather, something you don't so much listen to as find yourself inside. Distort Everything Forever, the debut full-length from Baltimore's Mike York recording as SUAHN, belongs to that category. It is dense, uncomfortable, periodically overwhelming, and strangely beautiful, sometimes within the same two bars.

York arrives here from an unlikely angle. He spent his formative years as guitarist for post-hardcore act Pianos Become The Teeth, a band whose defining characteristic was emotional extremity delivered through volume and repetition. That sensibility hasn't left him; it's just been compressed, turned inward, and rerouted through a very different set of machines. Where post-hardcore externalises anguish into room-filling noise, Distort Everything Forever internalises it into something eerier and less cathartic: club music with nowhere to go.

The album's genesis matters. York began building it in 2020, then a 2023 accident left him wheelchair-bound, confined to his own brain in ways that pushed the record toward something rawer. He wanted it to feel like being trapped, not as a concept but as a physical sensation. That much he achieves. The mix is close, suffocating in places, with synths that Bandcamp Daily's Dylan Green describes as resembling "black tar" underneath vocal samples, and bass lines so minimal they feel more like the spaces between sounds than sounds themselves.

Opener "Reverie" establishes the terms of engagement: a churning, muted melody interrupted by bursts of static that land like change rattling in a ceramic bowl, ordinary, dissonant, slightly wrong. "Drifting" then pivots into jittery drum 'n' bass territory with a low-end density that's less about sub frequencies and more about pressure, something pushing down from above. These two tracks are essentially a mission statement. York is operating somewhere between the woozy post-club drift of Burial and the fidgety anxiety of early Actress, while drawing on the syncopated snap of Baltimore club, a lineage that runs through his own city's electronic history and that he treats not as nostalgia but as raw material.

The album's most interesting structural move is the contrast between its maximalist and minimalist moments. "Thin Air" opens things out after the density of "Drifting," giving the listener space to breathe just long enough to feel exposed rather than relieved. "Losing My Grip" and "Lost in it All" play two different readings of dubstep against each other, one dense and claustrophobic, the other almost hollow, and the back-to-back sequencing makes the tension between them feel intentional and pointed. "Pressure" earns its title in full, opening with creaking, groaning sounds before the drums arrive and fold everything into a kind of reluctant motion, like a body forcing itself upright.

The penultimate "How Dark It Gets" is perhaps the most overtly functional track here, leaning into Baltimore club's rhythmic syntax (the syncopated kick patterns, the fractured hi-hats) in a way that briefly makes you think York is going to give you something to move to before pulling it back into unease. Closer "Thaw" earns its place by doing the opposite of what you'd expect from a closing track: instead of release, fuzzy synths expand and contract in a way Green likens to floating through space, untethered rather than resolved. York refuses to give you the catharsis the album's emotional logic might seem to demand.

Which is the point. Distort Everything Forever is an album about endurance rather than resolution, about finding something that might function as freedom within confinement rather than escape from it. Whether it fully succeeds as that depends partly on your tolerance for music that maintains this level of interior pressure across a full runtime; it never fully relaxes, which by design can be wearing. But York is a genuinely singular producer, and the way he metabolises Baltimore's club heritage into something so explicitly non-communal and body-specific is striking. This is body music for when the body won't cooperate.

Not easy listening. Not supposed to be.

Distort Everything Forever is available from Bandcamp