GENRE; Electronic
LABEL; planet Mu
REVIEWED: 10 November, 2025
RATING; 7.7
Ship Sket’s debut LP InitiatriX arrives less like an artist’s statement and more like a dare: can you make the club feel uncanny? Released via Planet Mu (the label that has long championed boundary-pushing UK electronic acts), InitiatriX positions 26-year-old Josh Griffiths somewhere between grime’s raw angles, drum-jungle’s propulsion and experimental sound-art plus a persistent taste for the grotesque and the theatrical. The record was issued late October 2025 and is being pushed across Bandcamp, streaming services and specialist sellers.
Sonically the album thrives on contrast. On one axis there are brittle, chopped breakbeats and 808 smashes; on the other, long, suspiciously human samples — whispered dialog, ritualized speaking, cello-like strings that hang in the air like fog. Ship Sket collapses genres by using their hallmarks as raw materials: grime stabs are stretched into uncanny drones, drill percussion mutates into jittery IDM patterns, and moments that could be pop hooks are deliberately skewed. The result feels both club-ready and persistently unsettling.
There are several standout moments that show the album’s range. Opener “Frost Cake” throws you in with hyperactive breakbeats and filthy distortion — violent enough for the pit, too detailed for background noise. “Dysentery,” already singled out by several critics, exemplifies Ship Sket’s signature: a track that fuses bit-crushed 808s with off-kilter strings and guttural vocal fragments to create an uneasy, slow-motion collapse of styles. “Vendetta’s Theme,” which features Charlie Osborne, softens that brutality with a shifting melody that nonetheless never relinquishes tension. Meanwhile “Permanent Kigurumi” and other shorter pieces read like ritual interludes — creepy, tongue-in-cheek and hypertextural.
Lyrically and thematically the album leans into a mythology of “latent darkness” beneath quotidian life spirituality, fetish, memory and English identity are recurring threads. Bandcamp’s press blurbs and recent reviews note this preoccupation; it isn’t literal storytelling so much as mood-building: cultural fragments and sampled speech become a second instrument, turning familiar British sonic signifiers into uncanny relics. It’s music that wants you dancing while looking over your shoulder.
Production-wise, InitiatriX is deliberately abrasive but precise. Textures are layered so that the low end bangs while the top end crackles with micro-articulations; the album’s mixes favor immediacy — you feel the aggression and the claustrophobia without collapsing into mud. That clarity matters because many of the compositional choices — abrupt edits, processed vocals, clashing rhythms only work when you can hear each element’s intent. For listeners who love maximalist UK electronic music (or feel nostalgic for the experimental IDM era), there’s a lot to admire here.
If the album trips, it’s because the aesthetic can feel like an affect at times: shock-for-shock’s-sake textures or theatrical vocal samples that flirt with pastiche. At roughly forty-odd minutes across a dozen tracks, the record occasionally prioritizes attitude over emotional development. Some fans will adore that relentless, performative weirdness; others may wish for a stronger melodic through-line.
