SAMUEL HYLAND

Earlier this month, the Polish singer Maria Manow, who performs lead vocals in the electro-clash duo Bassvictim, posted and quickly deleted a concerning Instagram story: a selfie, one side of her face bloodied, with a frank explanation as to why. “Ike punch me in my face so bad he ripped out my dermal,” she wrote, with a smiley-face emoticon. “#brotherly love.” In the summer of 2022, Manow met Ike Clateman, a London producer, at a Berlin bar, and immediately disliked him. Not long later, Clateman was at Peckham audio, a notorious UK club, shuddering with the thud of a sub-bass, and scrawling into his notes app: “im making out with the bass / im inside the bass / torture bass / tortureed by the bass / bass torture / bass victim.” He found Manow outside, he claims, and proposed a “bass house project where I produce and you do vocals.” Within 24 hours, the pair, now called Bassvictim, had recorded their debut single, titled “Air on a G String” — a nod, presumably, to Bach’s “Air on the G String,” except the “G string” in question is not the kind you find on a violin.

“We tried to be an open book. We thought that in the era of pristine musician Instagram profiles, full of polished press pictures, promoted tour announcements and HD music videos, our relaxed approach, our real life with our real problems, would feel like a breath of fresh air.”

Oftentimes, Manow, who owns a personal Instagram account, posts candidly on the more-followed one of the band: asking for flavored vapes, weighing in on alt-pop beefs, and rambling about her daily dilemmas. As an aesthetic entity, Bassvictim are equally well-curated and anti-curatorial, their radical carelessness forming something of a brand identity in itself. “Air on a G String,” their best and most popular song, succeeds, in part, because it is structurally similar—a sloppy, self-deprecating mess that winds up being irresistibly sexy, almost by accident. Lyrically, Manow’s monologue is simple and free-associative, delivered like a drunken club-rat sizing up a potential suitor: 

I’m walking down the street

You looking at my ass

What is on your feet?

You wearing Adidas?

Okay, that’s actually kinda hot

And I really like your pants

And your face looks hella cute

You look like you can dance.

This is parasocial eroticism, and very, very accessible: sexual tension for silent clubbers, staring at one another, imagining things. In her slurry singsong, Manow both deprecates and deifies herself, playing deluded desirer and disinterested object of desire. Physically unable to get “inside the bass,” Clateman resolves, impressively, to flip it inside out, wriggling sneakily between root notes and harmonic overtones. It is a cheeky parody of a musical breakthrough, and somehow, a musical breakthrough in its own right: fun, flawlessly-crafted, really fucking good. These are difficult things to balance, and at their best, Bassvictim—an unserious duo that makes seriously good music—balance them precociously well. The challenge, as of late, is that plainness and performance are much more difficult to reconcile in real life.

When “Air on a G String” came out last year, it was the lead single of Basspunk, a slight debut album whose title, a near-inverse of “Bassvictim,” doubles as a declaration of attitude. If “punk” represents one cultural class, the rough-edged, bloody and real, then “victim” might represent its heretics, the self-obsessed, self-pitying and fake. The founding ethos of the duo, to be “tortured” and victimized by sound, is punk in spirit: masochism in service of catharsis. It just so happens, ironically, that this Punk sensibility belongs to an electroclash act, whose strobe-lit dance music is not only silly, but to some, “indie sleaze” — a catch-all term for photogenic DJs, flashy ravers, Instagram it-girls, and other things Punk might seem to fundamentally oppose. In their anti-aesthetic aesthetic, Clateman and Manow mirror Punk’s original paradox, of rejecting commercialism so effectively that one becomes a commercial brand. But the line between “person” and “product” is thin, and when Manow posted the bloody selfie, she seemed to realize something similar about complexity and candor. Inundated with backlash, she deleted the original story, then followed up, on behalf of the duo, with a rushed paragraph:

We tried to be an open book. we thought that in the era of pristine musician instagram profiles, full of polished press pictures, promoted tour announcements and HD music videos our relaxed approach, our real life with our real problems will feel like a breath of fresh air; will feel like the last authenticity we wanted you to know us for us. But I guess that’s impossible

Meanwhile, on Clateman’s personal Instagram account, comment sections brimmed with concerned call-outs, each coalescing around one simple, incredulous question: “y u hit girls?” In response to one such inquiry, Manow posted two quick rebuttals, in rapid succession: first, “fuck off you loser,” then, “you’re embarrassing.” If it wasn’t for the context, the first reply might have felt kindred, in spirit, to the musical act under scrutiny: candid, understated, more sincere than it makes obvious. “They r just worried for u.”

“So I walk into this place and Alice is on stage, and all the old punks are telling her to fuck off, and she’s spitting beer in their faces and telling them that they’re pussies.”

Long before the selfie incident, Bassvictim were often compared, somewhat lazily, to the electroclash act Crystal Castles, whose disposition became an indie-sleaze ur-text: dark, druggy, seductively detached. That duo, which has since disbanded, comprised producer Ethan Kath and vocalist Alice Glass; in 2017, three years after her departure, Glass joined numerous other women in accusing Kath of sexual assault. (A subsequent defamation lawsuit was struck down by a Los Angeles court.) For all their aesthetic contrivances, there was alluring rawness in their approach, this fuck-all abrasion that seemed to offset their hipster appeal. Oftentimes, the pair—both alums of underground punk bands—seemed resistant to the weightless bliss of their era, a photo-forward moment that embraced vibes more readily than violence. Their raucous sets, complete with a live drummer, recalled the Stooges more largely than they might have anticipated Snow Strippers: a flailing, bloodied Glass, a stoic, leather-jacketed Kath, and a swarm of sweating teenagers, beating the shit out of each other. To some extent, this intense act was informed by an intense upbringing, years spent standing their ground in scenes that spat people out. “So I walk into this place and Alice is on stage, and all the old punks are telling her to fuck off, and she’s spitting beer in their faces and telling them that they’re pussies,” Kath once recalled of meeting his bandmate. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: she was so powerful yet she was this tiny teenager, sticking up for herself not giving a shit about the consequences.”

Paradoxically, these very protagonists are also, sometimes, Punk’s favorite people to pick on: tiny teenagers sticking up for themselves, not giving a shit about the consequences. When Glass and Kath were the teenagers in question, “Punk” was entering an umpteenth apotheosis, democratized—or, if you want, desecrated—by downtown cool-kids with CUNY degrees and CBGB connections. “Indie Sleaze,” in its initial iteration, was not only dance-centric, but uniquely punk-adjacent: a direct product, perhaps, of a paranoid city, reeling from a terrorist attack and crawling towards the club. The last time clubbers and punks had so closely coexisted in New York, “dance-punk” was a zany export of No Wave, a scene whose dissonant philosophy—united against unity—produced equally dissonant music. The difference, thirty years later, was that rampant image-sharing had heightened the stakes: by the aughts, not only was Punk sounding more accessible, but looking like it, too. Had this been the ‘80s, the typical “dance-punk” artist might have been an art-world eccentric, infiltrating disco and roughening its contours. This time around, sonically and visually, “dance” seemed to be the infiltrator, and “punk” appeared subject to a terminal softening: LCD Soundsystem was no Lizzy Mercier-Descloux.

“We r not in an abusive relationship, there’s no pattern. Just had a bad day.”

Under these circumstances, it feels symbolic, if not prophetic, that Punk—a grizzled genre with an image to uphold—would gatekeep against Glass and Kath, the future faces of its diffusion. Online, and especially since the selfie incident, Manow has begged fans to “stop comparing us to Crystal Castles,” though the parallels might have appeared glaring: vibe-based overtones, disturbingly violent undertones. For all their scene-adjacency, Bassvictim come across, often, as fringe characters in the club circuit, young fun-lovers fucking around. But much like Glass and Kath before them, the duo represent, begrudgingly, a cultural segue, between one ossified past and a present that largely borrows from it. Fifteen years removed from This is Happening, there is reportedly—depending, of course, on who you ask—an “indie sleaze revival,” and it is doing to “indie sleaze” what “indie sleaze” once did to Punk. Distinct as each category may seem, they are unified, and made vulnerable, by a shared condition: neither has a singular, concrete definition, which means that both are empty cultural classes, doomed to be “revived” until there is nothing left to revive. Oftentimes, a “revival” of something requires a removal of its raw material—its blood, its violence, its risks—in favor of its most attractive (see: salable) properties. Yet where Crystal Castles graced electroclash with Punk’s aesthetics, Bassvictim seem intent, instead, on doing the same with its spirit: bloody, violent, raw and real. The tricky thing, as “electroclash” and “indie sleaze” become interchangeable, is that binary, rough-edged realities may no longer fit either’s constraints. “Indie sleaze” isn’t real, and maybe, its capacity for “real-ness” isn’t, too. “The moment people in your phone start saying something’s back,” the critic Meaghan Garvey recently wrote, “that’s when you know it’s over.”

Phone-people tend to speak in absolutes, and for Bassvictim, a duo victimized by its own Punk ethos, this denial of nuance might be somewhat unfair. (“We r not in an abusive relationship, there’s no pattern,” Manow wrote, then quickly deleted, in a follow-up Instagram story. “Just had a bad day.”) Then again: abuse is quite serious, and when a “bad day” becomes a bloody ordeal, it very much looks like it. What gives? In their all-revealing realness, Manow and Clateman embody, even to their own detriment, complete, self-effacing truth: an honorable tenet, except sometimes, the “truth” in question is not as honorable as the act of telling it. Nebulous as “Punk” may be, its central philosophy, if there is one, is somewhat similar—seeing the world for its brutal, bloody realities, even if the cost of catharsis is suffering. In a 2015 essay on hardcore, the critic Kelefa Sanneh described Punk, its predecessor, as a “tantalizing suggestion” that “rock music should be something more than mere entertainment—that it should, somehow, pose a threat to mainstream culture.” Oftentimes, the distinction between “mainstream” and “underground” seems to lie in “authenticity,” an empty term that doubles as a pointed finger: they are lying; they are fake; they are unlike us, the bleeding and earnest. At present, all culture loosely aspires to underground-ness; the best thing one can be, in 2025, is “vulnerable.” But in the case of Bassvictim, earnest vulnerability coincides, inconveniently, with an era so deeply obsessed with it that it rigorously polices it. Wielded properly, this functions to prosecute people who—like Ethan Kath—suppress ugly truths, particularly when they involve the abuse of others. Conversely, when the sin of violence meets the virtue of vulnerability, the lines become much blurrier: an outrageous inconvenience, for all parties involved. 

“Love their music, but Maria is starting to give Azealia Banks vibes. Made some bangers but they’re too insecure and lack the maturity to handle even a small taste of fame so they keep crashing out for attention.”

Ironically, Bassvictim are very interesting—and, at best, very impressive—because of their ability to blur cultural lines, shirking solid binaries without ever really seeming to care that much. What feels appealing about their music, especially post-selfie incident, is how serpentine it often strives to be, almost in spite of its genre. As a vocalist, Manow specializes in a certain slurry, disaffected drawl, slinking through her lyrics like a guitarist bending a string. Her best performances, like “Air on a G String” and “Live too fast,” are buoyed by the equally-sinuous Clateman, whose own arrangements—fluid and start-stoppy, like a malfunctioning Bluetooth speaker—change too quickly, too often, to be committed to memory. “With You,” from January’s Basspunk 2, is so exhilarating that it obscures how much is actually going on: a glitchy heartbreak anthem, a pulsing club banger, a (shockingly effective!) screamo interval, a Discovery-esque bass overtone, and a petulant Manow, drifting between heartbreak and hedonistic excess. It’s a dynamic representation of 20-something-ness, less about the club than the ups and downs that warrant it. And maybe, in the grand scheme, Bassvictim’s genius is the sort you must live, not learn: they are good at making music, because they are better at being young. As I type this sentence, the pair are teasing a new release, in the most characteristic way possible: an Instagram story, photographed by Cobrasnake, with the caption “this is what making the new album felt like basically.” In the photo, Manow, Clateman and a friend are sprawled across a hotel bed, puffing on vapes, clutching a Macbook. Sometimes, this time included, part of me imagines a flustered, nonexistent publicist, checking their social media and taking a big, suicidal gulp of red wine. Another part of me—a larger part of me—feels privileged that I get to watch these talented teenagers grow up.

Before Manow joined Bassvictim, she was the lead vocalist of FC MALINA, a Polish electronic duo with an abrasive, industrial sound. Last month, on the Bassvictim subreddit, an early photo surfaced: a squinting Manow and a brooding bassist, performing in what looks like a dingy squat. That act, which has since disbanded, almost feels retconned, in retrospect—a lone three-track EP, a noisy sonic palette, and a grungy years-old photo, like lore sprinkled in by a frazzled showrunner. Much like Glass, Manow is more Punk than she often gets credit for, and the reason why is not her fault: Punk is a binary, and as she has grown up, she has rightfully outgrown it. In the nebulous world people call “indie sleaze,” scene-adjacency is largely algorithmic, less dependent upon what one sounds like than who one is photographed with. Paradoxically, if Manow’s own digital footprint fits her within this “movement,” it is precisely by placing her within other ones: a cameo in a Bar Italia music video, a photo with Snow Stippers’ Tatiana Schwaninger, a selfie with an autofiction opus (“healing,” she writes, reading Taipei by Tao Lin), a scathing read of the Lana-Ethel beef. One might argue, this considered, that digital “scenes” are not real—at least, not as much as their complex constituents are. It is easy to compartmentalize, commodify, and simplify art. Doing so with human beings is much more difficult.

“Stop making us into Alice and Ethan; that shit cringe. U don’t know us and u don’t know them either.”

In the week following the selfie incident, it became vexing to understand—let alone defend—Bassvictim, an act that had outright rejected the concern of its supporters. For obvious reasons, those supporters began to reconsider their loyalties. “Love their music,” one response to an online questionnaire began. (The question: Do their fans even fw them?) “But Maria is starting to give Azealia Banks vibes. Made some bangers but they’re too insecure and lack the maturity to handle even a small taste of fame so they keep crashing out for attention.” On another, more threatening front, some considered divesting from the duo financially: in one Reddit thread, fans seriously mulled the implications of supporting their upcoming tour, especially if it meant excusing “explicit abuse.” Watching it all unfold, I felt bad for Manow, but conflicted as to why. On one hand, her bloodied face was very real, and very concerning. Intently as she had refuted Crystal Castles comparisons, there was a reading, and an easy one, that turned her into Alice Glass—a talented woman whose rightful ascent was marred by wrongful harm. Then again, it was necessary to recall that Glass was silenced, and Manow was not. This was the other thing: here was someone who had publicly confided in her supporters, entrusted them with her private struggles, then wound up suffering both publicly and privately. (“I’m not a bad person, we both equally good and bad people,” she wrote in another Instagram story. “Stop making us into Alice and Ethan; that shit cringe. U don’t know us and u don’t know them either.”) It is poetic, maybe a little crude, that the subject of the saga—Manow’s autonomy—was also its object, the thing undermined by valiant attempts to rescue it. More poetically, and less crudely, it also wound up being the decisive concluding factor.

Days after the original selfie, Manow, who is—of course—active on the Bassvictim subreddit, posted a lengthy PSA titled “Maria’s statement from Maria you might want to read.” For someone so committed to manic-posting, it was disarming to read her in this confessional mode, completely devoid of irony. It was a definitive end-all that answered most, if not all, of the questions. It also kind of made you feel horrible. “You think we don’t read what you say?” she opened. “Well, now we do, and it’s an extremely painful experience. Soul crushing experience that we do not deserve.”

Who determines what deserves to be punished? I didn’t take a screenshot, but around this time, I remember Manow posting a Yin-Yang symbol, with a caption to the effect of “Some of y’all have never seen this and it shows.” In the moment, it felt like a grave oversimplification: excusing a violent encounter by gesturing, lazily, at a universal symbol of peace. Gen-Z spirituality, protect your energy, good vibes only, et cetera. And yet, the more I think about it, the more I wonder why—speaking for myself—I so often forget that it isn’t a symbol of peace whatsoever. Arguably, Yin-Yang promotes a peaceful, net-positive philosophy: good can exist within evil; evil can exist within good. The caveat, as with other peaceful, net-positive philosophies, is that nuance is much easier to embrace on posters—and playlists—than in praxis. Something similar is often true of Bassvictim, a duo whose rough-edged spirit lies in conflict with its clean-cut context. The sad thing about the truth, and the art that aspires to it, is that it is very, very complicated.

Below, you can search for it in Manow’s statement, which has been reproduced in full.

☯️☯️☯️

Hey, it’s Maria and I’m finally ready to speak up here against this tirade directed at me and Ike. You think we don’t read what you say? Well, now we do, and it’s an extremely painful experience. Soul crushing experience that we do not deserve. We are aware of how easy it is to judge a situation without being able to fully understand it but much of this judgment feels based on past stories with other musicians, TikTok dramas, or personal projections that have nothing to do with us. I know there is a lot of awareness going on about domestic abuse, but this is simply not the case. To be an abuser means to abuse. And to be a victim means to feel abused. Neither applies to our current situation.

So first of all, I gotta say — guys, shut the fuck up. I’m not a victim and Ike is not an abuser. He’s a very sensitive soul with a lot of emotional baggage and he doesn’t deserve to be treated like this. It came to the point where we wake up in fear and sadness. In a place in some rural Norway where our main task is to make music (we made 10 songs so far) you’re hindering our process by all the gossip you can’t fail to produce. You’re ruining our lives and our livelihood by saying shit like this without having any context whatsoever, based only on some pic I posted in a momentary rage. Ike is a kind, gentle person who has never done a thing like this. His reaction came from being triggered by a fight we had, and by me saying something cruel about his dad, who died by suicide when Ike was 16. Yeah, he was not a child, not yet an adult — he was just a 16-year-old boy who never got the chance to say goodbye to someone he loved most.

2 days ago when we found out our New York show is sold out, ike couldn’t stop crying because it happened to be his father’s favourite venue. He’s already been feeling extremely low due to the fact that his own father — the one who put him on making music — the one he didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye to- won’t ever be able to experience us playing, share his success the way my dad does with me, that he wasn’t even able to share any music at all with him.

The rest of our argument was a mixture of silly disagreement and him misreading me as a person of privilege when in fact, even though I have the best father I can possibly imagine I come from a difficult family and have experienced some horrible stuff from my deceased grandma he didn’t know about. I don’t even feel angry at what happened. I provoked Ike, and I feel as bad for provoking him as he feels for me losing my dermal piercing. It was an accident — not something intentional or violent. Dermals are fragile, and if you research them, you’ll see how easily they can rip out. You should have seen Ike’s reaction when it happened: he was terrified, horrified, and couldn’t believe it.

What really shouldn’t have happened is that I impulsively posted about it online. That was private, family-level conflict, and I regret making it public. I reacted based on shock and anger and spite which I’m trying to learn how to control better. My dermal piercing was deeply important to me and I was stunned to see it gone. It’s a thing I’ve been dreaming of since I was a teen. It was a symbol against the rigid norms of my catholic upbringing. After caring for it for over a year, healing it, and even having nightmares about getting it ripped out, seeing it ripped out shocked me. I lashed out online. But I wasn’t thinking about how much trouble it would cause for both of us, or for our fans.

Now, to all of you: the Reddit haters, the pretend sympathizers, the justice warriors. What you doing by making posts about us, especially about Ike and creating your little speculations that feel no better than a high school gossip is ruining the chances for us to ever want to play shows, because we’re becoming too scared to play for people who hate us and want to harm us. You’re ruining the chances for us to ever be able to interact with the fans who actually love us at our shows and outside of them. You are ruining our freedom. Regardless of our media personas we both chill people who spend most time in nature and reconnecting with the real world. I know that recently I’ve gone a bit out of hand and earned myself a title of “bpd final boss” which is a result of the lack of new medication, a deeply traumatic breakup with my soulmate (whom I wrote curse is lifted about) and the lack of time to have regular therapy due to how many shows we have to play, how many responsibilities we have and how much pressure is put on us basically in a span of one year. A bit over a year ago I was just a bartender with a simple studio flat, shared with my boyfriend and regular schedule. Now we’re in constant move, I don’t have time to go gym or fully enjoy time with my friends and family and believe me, this tremendous change from a “normal person” to someone that is being judged at every corner is not an easy one mentally. Add in active ulcerative colitis, an illness I’ve been battling for a while, the cause of chronic stomach pain and chronic fatigue which makes me be in pain a lot of times and it’s not hard to see why my emotions sometimes overflow. Im sharing all this with you not to pity myself, but to simply highlight the reasons on why the certain opinions have been stupidly posted on our instagram.

Believe me when I say it, we were never striving to be as big as we have become. Our collaboration stemmed from us being best friends and soulmates who randomly decided to have a band after the speakers in a venue made us “the victims of the bass”. I don’t think I want to be really famous necessarily. I don’t think either Ike does. We both just live for making music, and we would die if we couldn’t make music coz it’s our destiny, not just bassvictim music , we make tons of different stuff ALL THE TIME. I also love being a performer and interact with people and being able to share the only thing I’m good at with all of you brings me more joy than anything in my life. It’s my passion that goes beyond a job or a hobby, I believe it’s our calling and we want to keep pursuing it. We have around 20 beautiful tracks waiting to be released. Ultimately however one day, I do wish to find peace in polish mountains, where we can build a music studio and have freedom from all this pressure.

Please, stop trying to make me believe that I have Stockholm syndrome and I’m manipulated by Ike. I’m not dumb. I’m in my mid-20s, I’ve done therapy, I have a university degree. I might have issues, but I’m cognitively sane and please I want you to believe me, if I was in a project with a person who truly was my abuser and not someone I love — who is my brother, my soulmate, a kind soul who is a good and caring person towards me, his girlfriend, and his friends — I would have left. Trust me. I’m smarter than that. We both have traumas and issues but we working it out – together. At the end of the day we’re both just normal people with dramas and high emotions caused by things I’ve explained above. If you cease to understand this stance then you’re welcome to unfollow us. In this extremely saturated music market I’m sure you’ll be able to find a musician who suits your music taste and your sensibility more.

SW.