Iceboy Violet's How to Glitch Under the Map is a snowstorm of uncertainty

It’s hard to describe, let alone capture, all that clutter and its threat, but experimental hip-hop artist Iceboy Violet has other ambitions on How to Glitch Under the Map, their first solo work since 2023's Not a Dream But a Controlled Explosion. Across the album's dozen fractured tracks, their signature glitched-out production reaches new heights of abstraction, melding with their flow so perfectly that, rather than their voice working in reaction to the beats, it all feels of a piece, combining in effect to build an oceanic wall of sound. Words and moments fade in and out of focus like data skating by on a screen, with mumbled speech and gang fights that give way to screams adding to its powerful drift.

Iceboy’s autotuned delivery shifts through different effects and styles, creating a sound closer to a choir than an individual singer, while their lyrics are in equal weights both minimal and mythic. The focus of the album is firmly in the present day and its bizarre lucidity, turning the online world occultic with lyrics about "TikToks in my sleep like prophetic dreams" and "clickbait ads like tea leaves" rapped over bubbling synths.

The industrial percussion of songs like "Dogtooth" almost overwhelms their vocals, clipping them into snippets as a form of pseudo self-censorship. Iceboy keeps their message distant, adding an uncanny terror to their subject matter. Ghosts are a constant presence across the album, both people and pieces of data left lingering in the background.

When clarity does arrive, it's vicious, almost emocore in its mixture of anger and anguish. On "TWAT" they shout about how “guilt had me sinking / at the club with concrete shoes,” the beat bouncing off their syllables, the bass rattling with their shouts. Album primer “Reflect//Deflect (Ghost Image)” opens up a world where “towers claw their way out the smog” and Iceboy is off “with shooting stars and dogs / on a collision course with god.” But the ground is always present, and on the chrome fantasy of “Even the Pigeons look like Opps” they come crashing down to meet it crying “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.”

That same loss for explanation is at the core of How to Glitch Under the Map. On the run from grief and guilt, Iceboy presents themself as lost, far from home, and having forgotten the route by which to get there. In a world now capable of infinite false flags and generative prophecy, these songs seem to ask how we find the truth of what we hide from when the truth as we once knew it no longer exists.

Is the album a lesson in decoding? Iceboy's messaging is obscure as internet arcana, where meaning threatens to be buried in a snowstorm of shrieking production and digital degrading. As I said before, it's hard to make sense of the signals, but that's part of what makes How to Glitch Under the Map so cuttingly effective, with all the haunting power of a scream in a crowd clipping out, or a shout for help censored on replay. It's not easy to poeticise the digital and real into sui generis myth, at least not without devolving into some form of fantastical larping, but Iceboy pulls it off in titanic and disturbing style.