“Death just exists. It’s not malicious, it’s not comforting, it’s just there”: How Backxwash shed skin and reimagined herself

Ashanti Mutinta wants what Lady Gaga has. Not necessarily the sold-out world tours or the outlandish rhinestone-encrusted outfits, but the chameleonic discography. If Mother Monster can pull off synthpop, rock and country in the space of seven albums, Ashanti would like to think her output as Backxwash can be similarly far-reaching. (In case you were wondering, her favourite era is The Fame Monster – “That’s her magnum opus.”)

The alt-rap iconoclast had reached an opportune moment to do something different. She’d recently closed the book on a trilogy of records – 2020’s God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out It, 2021’s I Lie Here Buried With My Rings And My Dresses, and 2022’s HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING – that were as personal as they were intense. Against a wall of discordant industrial textures and intense beats, she unpacked her storied life thus far, growing up in a deeply religious community in Zambia, her history of addiction, navigating life after coming out as transgender at the age of 25.

She’s at peace with this ending. “I feel like I’ve said everything that I wanted to say and I did everything that I wanted to do with that sound and that album,” she says, speaking from her home in Montreal, where she’s bundled in a fleecy novelty hoodie to guard against the still-freezing Canadian chill outside. “Now, I think I’m ready to shift my attention to new horizons.” The product of that shift is Only Dust Remains.

Historically, music has spilled out of her quickly. From 2019’s debut Deviancy to HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST…, she’d dropped an album every year, four years on the bounce. For album five, she moved slower. The last time Ashanti spoke to K!, she mentioned needing to take a break from writing about herself, and she made good on her word. She spent a year not writing anything, playing shows and learning music theory, absorbing inspiration, recharging. However long this took was not a concern – if it took one year, two years, five years, it was fine – she was trusting the process.

“When I was ready to start making music again, I was really inspired. [Writing music] is just like riding a bike your whole life, and even when you’ve not ridden one for a month, you get back on it and it just feels natural.”

Ashanti knew that she wanted to be more deliberate. During the trilogy, she was bottling potent, glowing emotion in the heat of the moment, writing instinctually and then taking the songs to the studio a day later. For Only Dust Remains, she took her time. She’d write, set the music aside as if leaving it to marinate, return to it and reshape things. She wanted to be meticulous and selective with her sounds, almost as if she were curating them.

“I’ve always been really interested in pianos and string instruments,” she offers as an example. “I had a strong interest in early ’00s pop and I realised their string sections were amazing. The beats they made in that era were so dynamic, and I thought that was super-dope. It’s pretty nice to be able to make more dynamic songs.”

That meticulousness shines through in Only Dust Remains’ richer, more detailed sounds, which feel even more distant from any particular genre that the music Ashanti had already released as Backxwash. It’s less metal, but more fluid, glinting with unexpected touches from trilling strings and effervescent layers of piano, and there’s even a burst of guitar soloing in the fragile Stairway To Heaven that Prince would have surely approved of. The record’s final minutes, meanwhile, are led by the ethereal harmonies of a choir.

In a further departure from the trilogy, it’s not as strongly autobiographical as Ashanti’s work once was. There are still some quintessentially Backxwash references in there – the percussive 9th Heaven nods towards Angel Gabriel and asking the first man in the Bible, Adam, ‘why he chose the apple’ and her past issues with drugs. Now, Ashanti is looking beyond her own life, even beyond life in general, towards more existential concepts.

“The first part of the album is rather antagonistic towards existentialism, while the last part has a more accepting tone.” Indeed, within Stairway To Heaven, she declares: ‘Do not fear the void, it is not your enemy, neither is it your friend.’

“When you pass away, I think you are reunited with your ancestors,” she explains. How, and in what form, she’s not so clear on. “I think that can have a lot of meanings and so many different interpretations. But in general, you live life how you make it, essentially. By the end of the album, [I’m saying] death just exists. It’s not malicious, it’s not comforting, it’s just there.”

That existentialism is also later re-interpreted through a more political lens. It’s touched on briefly on opener Black Lazarus, but a substantial amount of the creeping, skeletal track History Of Violence is devoted to the current violence in Gaza. ‘So many lives remembered in tweets / I saw a clip of a man and they severed his feet,’ she raps, sombre yet furious. Ashanti looks at personal and political violence side by side, not comparing, but observing, contrasting the violence we can see against that which we can’t.

“I was conflating the violence that's in my control in the first verse, vs. the violence that is out of my control in the second verse. [I wanted to create] that duality and give two perspectives on the violence around us. The violence that's happened to me, it could happening next door, and you have no idea, vs. us all seeing [the violence in Gaza] on social media, and feeling powerless because we're going up against something so big, It’s two different perspectives on violence in itself.”

As dark as they may seem, Ashanti’s consciously letting hope in, all the same. Even the simple act of creating makes her hopeful.

“[To be alive] doing this is pretty crazy to me I guess. For somebody who thought I wouldn't even come this far, doing this exceeds my expectations. I'm hopeful of being able to express myself, and I'm hopeful of being able to make more music, share this with the world, and being able to make so many connections over the time.

“Doing all of this just gives a lot of hope.”

Backxwash's album Only Dust Remains is out now. She plays Supersonic Festival in Birmingham August 29 – 31

Read this next:

• Backxwash: “This is therapy for me… I’ve created a universe for all these pieces of work to live in”
• Scowl: “Please don’t check out. I hope I can plant that seed in young people who I see myself in”
• Zeal & Ardor: “The more music we put into this world, the more obvious it becomes who we really are”