Youniss

“I’m so post-post what you want from me.”

Antwerp-based multi-disciplinary artist Youniss Ahamad operates much like a quantum particle, constantly resisting categorization and knowability. His live performances at festivals like Rewire, Roadburn and Les Nuits Botanique have gained him notoriety as a musical firebrand mixing post-punk, hiphop, and noise. Ahamad’s unique path in the Belgian underground has been influenced by his ancestral roots in Cote D’Ivoire and Iraq. His experience growing up in the Antwerp suburbs as a Black person with an Arabic name inspired 2023’s White Space – marking a shift from cerebral dance music to distorted, experimental storytelling.

Each subsequent record has seen Ahamad shift his sound. Yet the overall trend has been toward more live, visceral performances: White Space was an outburst of electric guitar, spitfire vocals, and barbed breakbeats. 2024 EP Do We Try Beyond The Edge? continued in this vein, sharpening his lyrical bite against the colonial structures that still pervade everyday life in Belgium. On his upcoming record Ahamad steps out from behind the distortion, exploring the full range of his voice. An ode to the modern city and a clarion call against gentrification, Good Effort! marks yet another musical turn toward jazz, a chimeric combination of To Pimp A Butterfly-era Kendrick, Flying Lotus, and Slauson Malone. If one thing is consistent about Youniss, it’s his knack for breaking with expectation in a way that expands the field of sonic possibility.

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