“I THINK GENRE lines are blurring all the time,” says Montreal-based rapper Backxwash. “Experimentation is crucial for every genre these days. I think back to someone like Screaming Jay Hawkins and wonder what it would be like to see a modern equivalent of that now and try and make it happen. He was melding all genres, never apologising for it, and scaring people at the same time.”
The conversation about what defines ‘metal’ has raged on since it was invented back at the start of the 1970s. Is metal just defined by a sound? Or can it also be defined by an attitude: an unwillingness to compromise yourself, no matter the cost? If the latter is the case, then Backxwash is the most metal artist you’ll hear in 2020.
“I started making music when I was 13 years old in Zambia,” she tells us. “I was really into R&B, then I heard [rap legend Notorious B.I.G.’s] Mo Money, Mo Problems on the TV and asked my sister, ‘My goodness, what is this?!’ She told me that it was rap. I had no idea what that was, so she told me that rap had two rules: you had to rhyme words and you had to say something important. That idea sounded so exciting to me, so I started getting into that music and making beats. I came to Canada when I was 17, and moved to Montreal when I was 25, and that is when I started to discover more music.
It’s a very experimental city, and it aided my growth greatly.” It’s here that Backxwash - AKA Ashanti Mutinta - discovered heavier varieties of music, citing “black metal, death metal, industrial and punk” amongst others as key influences.