There’s no need to play XG‘s music backward to discover a secret incantation of terror; it’s right there from the jump, front and center. The Thai rapper’s sound on his debut album, Evil Empyre – Sacred Rituals, lures death metal, trap, and ambient sounds together to fashion a bleak vision of despair and anger. It looms ominously but silently in the corner as if it were a sleep paralysis demon made of guttural bass, glowering whispers, anxious effects, and clipped screams. Everything is big but reserved, full of a potent danger that finds its power lurking in mystery, never fully revealing itself like a permanent dusk that’s neither day nor night; a clear silhouette with details hidden behind vantablack shadows. (The new album drops at the end of March.)
The lyrics—a syrupy blur of Thai black magic, killing, gore, and drugs—are a distillation of XG’s history and interests. “I’ve always wanted to make music like this. My life hasn’t been so great,” he explains, detailing multiple overdoes, youthful diversions to the psych ward, and the death of his father. “I’ve been through a lot of shit. It’s just me, I guess. It’s how I am.”
XG’s treatment of black magic might scare some people, but he says that it’s simply another facet of Thai culture that’s rarely dealt with in music. “We’re not actually directing this towards anybody or trying to cause harm,” he shrugs. Lyrics about using the body parts of the dead to cast a harmful spell on enemies may be shocking but they are practices that still exist in some provinces (or maybe in your neighbor’s basement, for all you know). So it’s open game to him.
The consequences of tempting angry spirits are something XG says he’s experienced before when he accidentally kicked and destroyed a tiny spirit house outside his building as a teenager. He says right after it happened something hit him hard in the shoulder and when he looked in the mirror, he had a bruise with the shape of the brass fingernail extensions used in dances like Fawn Leb and in Nora. Later that night he saw the shadow creature of a dancer wearing a traditional uniform floating in his house. “I still get goosebumps talking about it,” he laughs while telling the story, showing the hairs standing straight up on his forearm, which is just one surface of many covered in NT Studio tattoos. She kept trespassing into his dreams, so he went and became a monk for a month because they told him something bad would happen if he didn’t.
The album is a collaboration with frequent partner S4EED, who pops up repeatedly with guest verses like persistent voices in your head. Together they’re called Evil Empyre, which veers much farther into horrorcore than the emo trap that S4EED’s known for since XG got his start in hardcore and death metal and is trying to mold that output together with his rap music. You can hear this influence most clearly when he switches from whisper mode into full-on screamo in the same verse. But it also dips into dance music territory, with one track of cemetery rave house music. “I just love music in general, genre doesn’t matter,” he says.
Although XG is purposefully creating music that might be considered antisocial, he thinks people are ready for it: “I don’t see my music as being in opposition to any other sound. I just want to give people myself, basically. What I think and feel at a certain point. I want listeners to dive into my world, to experience it for just three minutes.”
