Moor Mother follows her amazing 2016 album, ‘Fetish Bones‘, a collection of home-recorded protest songs that are as fierce as they are strange, testaments to troubling time, with this, her second release on the Don Giovanni label. ‘Crime Waves‘ is a collaboration with producers Mental Jewelry. Continuing with the subject matter of ‘Fetish Bones’: racism and police violence, ‘Crime Waves’ packs an avalanche of sound and words into its shorter EP-length duration.

Coiling bass and echoing sonar-ping beats erupt from opening track, ‘Hardware’, Moor Mother repeating “is anybody out there?;” police brutality, blood and taser guns described with a pixelated noise-eroded voice. The vocal delivery is anguished and desperate: “how dare I exist?”; the music is an uneasy combination of sick-step rhythms, queasily pitching sound-levels and industro-scrape atmospherics bouncing off a brick-wall background. ‘Death Booming’ is a woozy low-key nightmare; low, slow and sparse; claustrophobic can-clack…