Blackhaine shares a music video for his second single ‘Prayer’ featuring British singer, composer and songwriter Blood Orange aka Dev Hynes and rising Manchester rapper and producer Iceboy Violet. It’s the second single of Heyes’ new EP Armour II, produced by Rainy Miller and also featuring fellow NW talent Moseley and KinseyLloyd.
‘Prayer’ is an epic combination of thizzing rap and iridescent electronica with a lushly harmonised chorus that sees Blackhaine discover a raw power in vulnerability. He brilliantly defuses drill aggressiveness with a luscious tenderness and hype R&B soul while skewing its road-level thoughts on violence.
Sacred properties With the second EP scene-setter ‘Stained Materials,’ Blackhaine and Rainy Miller up the drama of their Armour series. It’s a rap song about the stain of guilt that revisits important locations from Blackhaine’s prior songs, evoking a late-night car trip through Salford lost in his own thoughts before hand-brake turns to thugged-out paranoia at the club.
Armour II sees Blackhaine and his classmate, now his producer, Rainy successfully progress and embody their socialist-realist brand of drill noise sonic fiction with a perfected armoury of narrative tropes, heightened in effect by amazingly imaginative sound design.
Blackhaine brings heightened emotional intelligence and poetic dexterity to Rainy’s most ravishing fusions of drill and ambient noise for six songs that artfully dissect and render the question of life and death through a lens of lived experience, drawing on lessons learned since their cult first instalment.
The next chapter of the Armour psychodrama is told from multiple perspectives and via recurring subplots of purgatorial hotel rooms and paranoiac rave skulking. It’s tied together with a remarkably immersive sound design in innovative arrangements, rejoined by Iceboy Violet and boosted by Dev Hynes (Blood Orange) plus extended fam Moseley and Kinsey Lloyd.
Rainy’s anthemic chorus and detuned chamber strings serve to temper Armour’s narrative arc and contour its neon greyscale palette. This peerless finesse and mature poise doubtless places Blackhaine and his spar as a key voice from their generation of working-class youth.
Written and performed by Tom Heyes aka Blackhaine
Produced by Rainy Miller
Featuring Rainy Miller, Iceboy Violet, Blood Orange, Moseley, KinseyLloyd