RETOX MAN

Metal Preyers spin out another warped page in their fever-dream songbook with Retox Man, a 12-track acid-laced carousel stitched from fragments of Brazilian baile funk, occult cut-ups and their trademark deranged sound design.

First tracked back in 2022, just after Nyege Nyege’s inaugural expedition to Brazil, the record captures that moment of contact with São Paulo and Belo Horizonte’s outsider funk scenes, where the razor-sharp tuin synth stabs (tuned to lanca perfume’s dizzy highs) lodged deep into Metal Preyer’s imagination. With hard drives loaded with raw street-level recordings from Heliopolis and Alto Vera Cruz, Hackett twisted the material into a funhouse maze, spiking it with entheogenic haze and Metal Preyers’ trademark menace.

Rather than mimic baile funk, Retox Man scrambles its signals into something stranger. a kaleidoscopic distortion that, like Muslimgauze’s work, unmoors the listener from geography altogether. Across its length Retox Man feels like being spun on a merry-go-round to hell: tropical, colourful, and lysergically twisted, where festive carnival horns buckle into queasy industrial clang, cartoon FX are fed through rusted samplers, and voices rise like hallucinated spectres.

While it precedes their recent collaboration with Brazilian outsider Akira Umeda, Retox Man stands on its own as one of Metal Preyers’ most unhinged dispatches, part horror soundtrack, part psychedelic travelogue, part street-corner possession ritual. It’s another step in Nyege Nyege’s ongoing mission to detonate borders between traditional, popular and experimental musics, and a reminder that the Metal Preyers remain among the label’s most unpredictable operators.

LISTEN & BUY  RETOX MAN