Alt Blk Era

Fearlessly bold in its vision and unbridled in its execution, this is an album seized by the shock of the urgent, an expression of defiant intention to be seen and heard and never again to be overlooked.

ALT BLK ERA are not just unbound by genre, they run circles around them. Listen to Rave Immortal and you hear the alt-metal of ‘Come on Outside’ rub shoulders with the earth-rumbling drum’n’bass pound of ‘Crashing Parties’. ‘Hunt You Down’ imagines a darkwave underworld version of Billie Eilish, while brash punk rap hyperfuels ‘Come Fight Me For It’.

The dexterity is eye-watering even before you learn that the sisters are only 20 and 17 years old. If their taut, tinderbox energy seems to scream with a frenetic need to maximise their every second, then there is a reason for that. In late 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Nyrobi was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, leaving her constantly tired and in acute pain. For the first year of her illness, she found herself drifting in and out of unreplenishing sleep for up to 22 hours a day. Amid a distressing time, the one salvation proved to be an online music course suggested to her by her mother. Attending twice a week alongside Chaya, it offered Nyrobi a focal point to her new life, a reason to take on the pain and get out of bed. The sisters reconnected in a profound way, drawing inspiration from those fleeting, special hours.

Before long, they were writing songs together. “Without the music, I don’t think I could have done anything,” Nyrobi now reflects. This album is the result of that sentiment, many of its songs drawn from the emotionally conflicted life experience the two were navigating. On ‘Come on Outside’, we hear Chaya sing to her sister: “Come on outside/You’ve gotta live before you die/They don’t know your fight/So they can’t say you didn’t try”. The poignancy resounds all the more pointedly when you learn that simply going into their back garden in a wheelchair was a mission for Nyrobi at the time.