“Sorry for fog, I feel self-conscious,” Maria Manow of Bassvictim giggles in her slightly broken English, swirls of theatrical smoke obscuring her silvery blue hair, dark top, and thigh-high socks. Her bandmate, the producer Ike Clateman, is somewhere else onstage, cloaked in the haze. The galloping bass of the phonk tribute track “Canary Wharf Drift” kicks off, and a blitz of white lights flashes across hundreds of people jumping so hard the floor wobbles.
It’s the fast-rising London duo Bassvictim’s first tour and their first of two shows in New York City. Everyone at the Brooklyn venue Market Hotel is young and hot: girls with tiny bags, tiny shorts, and tall socks, guys in tank tops talking about how they drove in from Bard College. Manow vaults into the crowd to perform “Air on a G String,” their first and still maybe best song, where she trills about running with her underwear exposed over slinky-sexy synths. Swaggering around the stage, Manow is triumphant, imperturbable.
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Indie sleaze, the hallucination of a 2000s seedy-chic genre that never fully existed, is in vogue. It’s the tagline of Spotify playlists and TikTok videos galore. Anyone vaguely near the aesthetic gets christened it by fans, including Bassvictim, who were always funnier and more creative than the other modern electroclash revivalists. They’re determined to both live up to and nuke these expectations by being as raw as possible. This has translated into freakishly unstable songs that spin from garish wubs and witch folk to lullaby-like purrs. Their knack for samples, melodies, and sculpting moments of bliss is intoxicating. But observing the band’s rise has become something like watching a therapy session gone wrong, with “crashouts” and violence overrunning their personal lives.
There’s a realness to Bassvictim—both in their sound and the way they carry themselves—that feels shocking to witness. They’re DJing in a random field in Toronto with celebrity TikTokers, being exiled from Berghain after treating it like a frat show, getting evicted from apartments and shit-talking their peers without any care about who they’re burning. On this fall evening, it seemed like Manow was on the brink of quitting everything.
At 5 p.m., after the interview was pushed back two hours, Bassvictim finally enter the empty expanse of Market Hotel. In the green room, Manow throws her stuff down and starts saying she doesn't want to do the interview, she’d rather Clateman do it all. She’s in an agonized headspace in part because she lost her good luck charm, her beloved hairclip. “I just know the way I feel in my mind, I’m only going to say negative things,” she says. “People think I’m confident, but I’m not.” Clateman, who has scraggly chops, a patterned scarf wrapped around his neck, and a gray button-up—like a hippie dressed up for Picture Day—coaxes her into talking.
I start to ask if they live together, and Manow gets upset. “Can you just do an interview with Ike?” she says, throwing her hands up.
“Come on,” Clateman goes.
“No, I don’t give a fuck,” she shoots back.
It turns out Manow and Clateman had been living together, along with other artists—including Manow’s ex—in an HMO in Plaistow before she and her ex broke up. Now Clateman and Manow live separately in other parts of London. Agitated by Manow’s agitation, Clateman puts his head in his hands and suggests we wait a little while to get comfortable with each other. Manow does a bump of K on the table to relax while Clateman shows me a high-tech nicotine vape that displays music videos and also rates the intensity of your hits with a numerical score.
Manow is crying now. “I like to make music, I like to fucking sing, and I like to perform and make people happy, but being a big band was never my intention. I don’t like attention on me,” she says in between sobs, crouching on the other side of the room. “I don’t like having pictures taken, I don’t want to have this interview. I don’t give a fuck about this kind of thing. I’m literally just doing it because I want to make these people that listen to us happy and feel like they can relate to something, and I’m also doing it so I can get my parents rich and make myself rich... it actually stresses me out thinking that at some point we might be bigger than we are right now.”
I tell them they’re too good at making music. “Fuck, it’s such a curse,” Clateman laughs. I joke that they should make their Instagram private. “I’ll do it right now,” Manow says. “I’m gonna be fine, sorry,” she adds after a pause. “I’m a really anxious person… I just wish you met the happy and confident Maria that I usually am,” Manow says. “She might come out in five minutes,” Clateman suggests.
Just as things calm down and we start talking again, the soundcheck in the main room—for their opener, the artist Worldpeace DMT—begins blaring like crazy. We need to almost yell to be heard. I float the idea of relocating to the bathroom—but the bathroom and hallway have no doors so the noise streams in. We wander all around the venue, downstairs, past the “STAFF ONLY” barricade into a derelict little storage corridor. It’s a sad scene: Clateman crumpled on the floor in front of the elevator, Manow bent over pallets of Schweppes and Gatorade, me towering over the two of them.
Manow starts weeping again. She’s paranoid about her outfit for the show. “I look like a caricature, a fucking parody of what Maria was supposed to be… this fucking ‘American Apparel indie sleaze’ fuck off. ‘Oh my god she’s wearing American Apparel socks and plastic shoes. She has her hair blue, she’s so soft-grunge’ fuck off. I don’t know what I like anymore, I don’t like anything,” she cries, legs dangling over the pallet. “I just wanna wear comfy shoes and a jacket and live in the countryside. I don’t want this. I don’t like the city. New York is so hard.”
Even in the bowels of the building, it’s loud as hell. “They’re taking the piss actually,” Manow says of the volume. We retreat to the green room, where I scream-interview them. At one point, the people in the main room start soundchecking one of Bassvictim’s songs. “Brother, fuck off!” Manow howls over the flashfire of “Gajówka,” before going out to tell them off.
Bassvictim have become infamous for this kind of no-holds-barred gut-spilling in Instagram Stories. Combine that with their need to survey what people are saying about them online, and you get a toxic feedback loop. Manow has described herself as the “final boss” of borderline personality disorder. They’ve posted sudden messages to Instagram saying the group is over, like when Manow ominously called Ike a “traitor” in late July before quickly reversing and saying she was in a “vulnerable state” and “might have sent some crazy stories.” In September, Manow posted a photo of her bloodied face and said Clateman knocked out her dermal piercing during a fight. Fans immediately freaked out, before Manow scolded them in a long Reddit note for “gossiping” and said watching people get upset was a “soul crushing experience.” She explained that she had goaded Clateman by saying something cruel about his dad, who died by suicide when he was a teen. During our interview, she vehemently reiterates that she does not see their physical fights as an issue.
“These [online commenters] are empty-brained. You have to distance yourself from what you see online… I love Ike so much,” Manow says. “He’s the most important person in my whole life. I think if Ike died, I would cry more than if my grandma died—maybe not my dad, but if my grandma died. We’re just like siblings, we fight a lot—even physically—but then we make up, always.”
“I wouldn’t say we fight physically a lot, but it has happened,” Clateman cuts in.
“It has happened,” she continues. “I think it’s fine.”
Ike Clateman was born in Brooklyn, then moved to Westchester County just north of New York City and eventually Denver, Colorado, where he was involved with Rhinoceropolis, a famous local DIY venue that shut down in the 2010s. Later in his adolescence, he dropped out of high school and lived in warehouse squats across the country, paying rent with pizza delivery gigs.
Maria Manow was born across the world in Bydgoszcz, a city in northern Poland. Every summer, she’d hang out at her uncle’s “hippie-commune,” a collection of houses in a field in a village called Gajówka that’s tucked in the Polish mountains (she still goes multiple times a year). At 16, she moved to England. They both had previous music projects; under the name FC Malina, she made industrial pop that she says came out of her feeling “hopeless” and “exceptionally depressed.”
When Manow and Clateman first met as two Goldsmiths University of London students on a trip to Berlin in 2022, they instantly hated each other. They met again four months later outside of a show at Peckham Audio, a club in London. The sub-bass was so mammoth that Clateman scrawled phrases into his Notes app like “torture bass” and “bass torture,” landing eventually on “bass victim.” He spotted Manow outside and asked if she wanted to form a band. The next day, they recorded “Air on a G String,” which riffs on the Bach piece of a similar name to produce a collision of the highbrow and trashy.
Their debut album, Forever, sounds like temporarily regressing to your childhood self while tripping—a kind of gleaming innocence desperately fending off the darkness of adulthood lurking at the periphery. “That’s something we recognize in each other—we’re not really grown up,” says Clateman. “The goal is to get to the ‘child place’ when you’re making music.”
The album’s messy yet seamless scatter-spray of instruments—cello, hand shakers, piano—gets torn apart by the foulest plumes of bass. On the eco-cult anthem “Grass Is Greener,” Manow’s voice doubles and splinters like Mother Earth crying out. Clateman screws and scrambles the tracks like a DJ, glitching her voice out and giving traditional sounds a sparkly, psychedelic tint; on “Mr President,” the piano swirls like crystal vines growing around every key. My favorite is “Final Song,” which sounds like a hauntological take on 2010 recession pop—a simulacra of EDM excess where YOLO mantras are replaced by Manow pleading into the void and the beat winds down like hardware that knows it’s being sunsetted.
Bassvictim recorded Forever in two weeks in a residential sauna-studio called The Betty Fjord Clinic, located in the woods of Randsfjord Valley about an hour from Oslo, Norway. Clateman tells me it was so cheap it was almost too good to be true; the free-spirited idyll came with “three 70-year-old Viking hippies high on speed,” a studio packed with amazing equipment, and a “mad engineer” named Carl. “Their unprofessional vibe suited us,” Clateman smiles.
Clateman cites Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship,” Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s “Music for a Found Harmonium,” and the wonderful phrase “Lost in Translation with 808s” as guiding lights for Forever’s peripatetic sonic palette. There are diss tracks (the alluringly barbed “Dog Tag freestyle”) and love letters, such as “27a Pitfield St,” an ode to a house in Shoreditch that’s set for demolition. It was where their collaborator Ngahere Wafer and others lived, a “really special” spot where Clateman mixed much of Basspunk and they made many friends partying. The kinetic opening song, “It’s me Maria,” is partly about how people mispronounce her name, something I immediately fuck up when I ask them about it. “See, you’ve already made a mistake,” she says. “It’s so easy—it’s not Muh-ree-uh, it’s Mah-rya. Instead of putting three long ass syllables into this tiny ass name, you just put two… From the first time I landed in this stupid England world, I’d be like, my name is Maria. Then a fucking librarian from my school [would be like], ‘You mean Muh-ree-uh, right?’ I’m like, ‘Fuck off, no, I just said my name! Maria!’”
The duo originally planned to finish older material in Norway, but after three days messing around in the studio, they committed to a new project. The older music isn’t being shelved. They say it’s much darker, more minimal, with an ashy, gray atmosphere: the sound of a “girl about to be broken up with,” compared to Forever’s girl-who-has-slightly-processed-the-breakup feeling. As we talk about it, they start bickering over whether to add a date to the unreleased project’s title.
“I’m sorry, it has to be put as an album,” Manow says, “and it has to be put with a time bracket, otherwise I’m not doing it.”
“We’ll see,” Clateman replies. “I’m not polluting the title with the year, it doesn’t make sense to me.”
“I’m sorry, doesn’t Speaker [2024-2025] sound so good?”
“Not as good as just Speaker.”
“No, it sounds good! Can you just say something?” she turns to me, the impartial observer. “He doesn’t agree because he likes that name. But… it’s an album where I was speaking about my emotions throughout the whole year of 2024-2025. These are demos of my emotions.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Clateman says. “They both sound good.”
“You’re going to try to get me to steer your way, and I don’t believe in your way.”
I’m surprised to learn that there aren’t arguments like this when they make music. Actually, there’s no talking at all, “very much just vibrations,” as Clateman says; or as Manow says, “silence, vibrations and ketamine”—adding that some of her songs have been freestyled off K. “Make ketamine great again,” she chirps. “I think everyone should know that if they are struggling artistically, they should take ketamine.” Clateman looks uncomfortable. “I don’t want to endorse that,” she self-corrects. “Maybe I want to endorse that. If some people die as a result of that, so be it.”
Soon, it’s time for Bassvictim’s soundcheck, and then their photoshoot in the green room. Manow is still anxious, worried that her outfit makes her look too much like a goth. We take a vodka shot to loosen up. The photographer snaps pictures as someone brings in a giant tank, wrapped in a trash bag, filled with nitrous oxide. The scene starts to resemble a birthday party: trios of people toasting each other by clinking balloons. Manow and I bond over having the same spirit animal—raccoon—and she urges me to dye my hair like hers. She tells me how she loves Nathan Fielder and other cringe comedies, likes to play Monopoly Deal with her friends, and says she’s been filming a Bassvictim documentary on her PlayStation Vita. She expounds upon her love for the prized seashell necklace she's wearing; she's asked one of her friends to 3D model it so she can replace it if it goes missing.
As night approaches, the vibes turn celebratory. Waves of friends seep into the room, gathering around Manow as she smiles for the photographer. A layer of smoke descends over everything; Clateman sidles next to me on the couch and proudly regales me with tales of Bassvictim’s trail of wreckage, like all the clubs and houses they’ve been kicked out of.
When I ask about London music, Clateman trashes the Dean Blunt universe; makes a farting-spitting sound when I mention the Windmill Scene; says “fuck Cafe OTO” (the venerated performance space in Dalston) and “fuck Venue MOT,” a nightclub in a derelict strip of South Bermondsey. He alleged that the owner of MOT punched him in the face while screaming “incoherent Cockney noise,” as a result of what Clateman speculates was him smoking a cigarette while playing at the Goldsmiths Degree Show After Party in 2024. “The only words I heard was ‘endangering people's lives,’” Clateman says after making a series of noises in a Cockney accent. “That’s London’s problem in general: no good venues, no good restaurants, no good bars.”
In an email to Pitchfork, MOT’s Lucien Calkin refuted Clateman’s account and said there was no punch. Instead, Calkin claimed that the sound engineer at the show told him Clateman was “being fairly abusive & aggressive to him on the night,” although Clateman “apologize[d] to the engineer at the end of the night—we hold nothing against him for how he behaved as this does happen.”
“MOT has a very strict policy of not punching DJs FYI,” he added.
At 9 p.m., just before they hit the stage, disaster strikes. Manow has lost her beloved nicotine-free pink vape. Someone on her team silences the chatter like a classroom teacher and urges everyone to search. I flashback to the missing hairclip earlier, which resulted in her team ferrying in multiple packages of clips throughout the day until she was drowning in accessories. The green room fills with nervous tension—if the vape isn’t found, the whole show could be derailed. The 20 or so of us move chairs, tear up cushions, rifle through her sprawl of belongings on the ground. When everything looks bleak, a woman holds it up victoriously. Misery flips to bliss, and Manow announces to the room that the woman gets any merch she wants. Now, it’s showtime.
