Bassvictim: Peace + War review – like a thrillingly chaotic house party that goes on too long

(VOTB)​On their fourth buzzy project in two years, the gobby and combustible US-Polish pair are best when they’re leaning into the roughness of their sound

Even by the standards of an age in which artists are encouraged to maintain a constant stream of new releases to ensure that they maintain a continual presence in an attention-deficit economy, there’s something pretty startling about Bassvictim’s work rate. Peace + War is the London-based duo’s fourth project in two years: 19 more tracks to add to the 31 they’ve already released since last January.

It’s a lot, but then, reading Bassvictim’s interviews you wonder if they’re simply splurging out material in the knowledge that their time is limited. The duo – Polish singer Maria Manow and Brooklyn-born producer Ike Clateman – really don’t give the impression of a band built for longevity. They have already announced their split on at least two separate occasions and lurid stories of a reportedly turbulent relationship.

At the end of 2025, they gave a tumultuous interview to Pitchfork that began with Manow taking ketamine to calm her down and got progressively more chaotic from there. She kept bursting into tears, threatened to quit yet again and suggested artists who were struggling for ideas “should take ketamine … and if some people die as a result of that, so be it”. (If you incline to the Daily Mail line that gen Z should consider bucking up their ideas a bit, you might note that at least some of her distress was apparently occasioned by losing her lucky hair slide, and that, at one point in the feature, it looks as if the evening’s gig might be derailed because she’d mislaid her vape.)

You hesitate to mention the 00s revivalist tag “indie sleaze”, because the thought of being labelled as such was one of the things that started Manow weeping, but you can see why the label has attached itself to them. The ongoing obsession of teens and twentysomethings with dissolute early 00s alt-rock and electro could be a screw-you reaction to growing up in a climate of constant nitpicking surveillance on social media, pressure to maintain a perfect Instagram-ready outward appearance, and lectures about health and abstinence from wellness influencers. If that’s the case, then Bassvictim, in all their confused, gobby combustibility, might well be its poster children. On Peace + War, Manow’s vocals frequently tend to yelling in the manner of someone in the throes of an implacable end-of-a-long-night meltdown: better that, the suggestion seems to be, than the scenario sketched out in the lyrics of I Don’t Know: “To me your life seems mid … plain girl, plain meals”.

More prosaically, echoes of several micro-genres from the era of Myspace and MP3 blogs gust through their sound. Electroclash is the obvious comparison, but as Peace + War progresses, you also catch distinct hints of witch house in the keening, echoing, atonal synths of Charred Glass, chiptune on Summer Song’s tinny vintage video game soundtrack aesthetic, and the decade’s wholehearted embrace of the kind of indie pop once reviled as irredeemably twee. Manow’s vocals keep slipping from the aforementioned yell into a slurred, childlike and occasionally melodically wayward tone; I Don’t Know’s lyrical bitterness is set to a melody so perkily simplistic it sounds like a nursery rhyme. Elsewhere, their penchant for multi-tracking vocals into faintly chaotic-sounding playground chants has a hint of the Go! Team about it, while a four-to-the-floor powered collaboration with underground rapper Fimiguerrero, inescapably – and not unpleasurably – evokes the period where UK rap briefly turned its attentions to chart-friendly house-fuelled commerciality.

They’re capable of writing nagging pop hooks, and of slipping into a more contemplative space – the beatless electronics of closer The End might glitch, yet there’s a lulling, becalmed quality about them nonetheless – but Peace + War is at its most exciting when the rough demo-like quality of its sound evokes a sense of teeming chaos. When layer after layer of vocals, spoken word and random interjections give you the impression it was recorded in the middle of a particularly messy house party; when huge basslines suddenly appear at a volume that means they drown out everything else; when its songs don’t so much come to a conclusion as collapse in front of you.

The problem is one of abundance. Even if you understand Bassvictim’s desire to splurge out material while they’ve still got the opportunity, this is music that works best in short bursts, and ideas run thin over the course of an hour. “There’s no more words left to say,” sings Manow towards the album’s conclusion, or at least she does eventually. It takes her a few goes to get the lyric right; the mistakes, punctuated by frustrated sighs, are left in. She sounds exhausted by the whole enterprise, and the listener may feel the same way some time before she does.

Piss – How Can You Act Opposite to This Emotion Like a lot of 2026’s best albums, the cocktail of raw-throated punk noise, spoken word and sound collage on the Canadian quartet’s You Made Me/Skin on Linen is a challenging listen. But if you’re in the market for scourging fury, 2026 has produced nothing to compare.