Bassvictim: Testing Forms in Forever

Singer Maria Manow met producer Ike Clateman, her future bandmate in the British electronic duo Bassvictim, when Clateman’s roommate invited her to his house after a night of drinking in a Berlin park. Manow agreed, expecting a party, only to find Clateman sitting on his couch listening to the Austrian composer Franz Schubert. “The least party music,” Manow told musician Noah Dillon in an interview with Sex Magazine. She initially thought Clateman was “hella pretentious.”

Despite Manow’s rocky first impression, she found common ground with Clateman over club music. The two were inspired to start a band after running into each other at a London party. The sound of Bassvictim’s first two mixtapes, Basspunk (2024) and Basspunk 2 (2025), was shaped by the fast, high-energy sounds of London nightlife: loud, aggro techno synths and Manow’s cool, piercing singing, occasionally modulated to hyperpop-characteristic highs, detailing her drug-fueled exploits in the club. Through Basspunk, Manow created the party she was looking for. 

Bassvictim’s debut album, Forever (2025), however, harkens back to the duo’s first meeting in Berlin: Clateman, joined by Norwegian DJ FAKETHIAS, evokes Schubert’s melancholy in his somber, acoustic production. Manow follows his lead in her singing, now softer. Forever takes the band’s sound outside of the club, away from dopamine-infused dance and toward emotional introspection. 

Manow, singing about intense feelings of depression and rage instead of sex and ketamine, sounds rawer and more visceral. The band’s trademark voice modulation is used differently; what made Manow sound sharp and synthetic on Basspunk now creates dry haziness. In “27a Pitfield Street,” she laments on a house set to be demolished in a relaxed, whispery cadence evoking 2013 Yung Lean raps. Meanwhile, Clateman incorporates classical piano, bell sounds, and slower tempos in his production, sounds atypical for electronic dance: “27a Pitfield St” starts with light piano keys and drum snaps; In “Grow Up!!!” Manow sings over optimistic whistles and claps.

 Though Forever deviates from Basspunk’s style, it still maintains its trademark EDM synths and bass. The instruments are just decelerated to match the record’s gloomier ambiance. Forever builds on the band’s sound palette to create new vulnerability and pathos. The opener, “It’s me Maria,” retains Basspunk motifs: after a piercing 808 crash, loud and crackly EDM bass synths layer over each other as Manow sings in a raised octave. But the beat’s tempo is more subdued than Basspunk’s, and Manow’s voice is frantic but distorted, lacking the relaxed gravitas of an archetypal performer at Berghain. Manow screams “I’m / Maria this [EXPLETIVE]” into the microphone repeatedly in a manic and desperate display of assertive self-actualization.

Throughout Forever, Manow shuffles through vocal styles and emotions. These fluctuations are delivered by the new, controlled voice “27a Pitfield St” established. She takes on hip-hop gung-ho to materialize fury in “Dog Tag freestyle;” “I like the attitude of rappers, I like that vibe,” Manow had told Dillon. “It suits my personality.” An airy pad progresses in chord over a reverberating synth bass as Manow sings. Then, Manow spits “You're a little [EXPLETIVE] / You're boring, you worry,” starting a stream of vindictive, vitriolic diss raps toward someone she hates in a flow that is slurred and tenuto. In contrast, the subsequent track “Grass is Greener” has Manow singing her chorus in a falsetto that resembles a children’s choir, rising and falling in pitch over high piano taps. Manow sings about emotionally moving on through nature-related aphorisms: “the grass is greener,” “the water always colder,” “the roses always prettier,” a far aesthetic deviation from Manow’s roots in urban music. In capturing the feelings of childlike wonder at nature’s beauty or a hate-imbued MC, Manow’s delivery is messier, more cathartic. Manow tests the bounds of her voice artistically, seeing where it can go beyond the guaranteed cool-factor of a London DJ set to increase the depth of her reflections. 

Through experimenting with genres in Forever, Bassvictim correlates its sound with the classical high brow; one of the album’s last tracks, “Ike piano,” is played entirely with classical instruments, with Clateman belting out melancholic keys while Manow bows out of tune notes back and forth on the A and D strings of her cello. But by “Final Song,” the closer, the band is back in the club. Triumphant, sharp EDM leads blast over fast-paced, forceful snares, more explosive renditions of the same Basspunk sounds Clateman had dispersed throughout the album. After an album of looking inward lyrically and letting it all out, Manow finally can return to extolling hedonistic partying, perhaps in celebration of her completed project: “We're requesting for the vibes,” she chants.