Track six is called I AM A MAN, which is the placard Memphis sanitation workers carried in 1968, and Will Brooks never explains the reference because the record assumes you already have it. Eight tracks, forty minutes, out March 27 on Ipecac as IPC295LP: the eighth dälek album and the leanest, cut at Deadverse Studios across 2024 and 2025, mastered by Alan Douches at West West Side. Brooks and Mike Mare build it from dust-caked breaks, Wu-era strings and a wall of guitar feedback that never resolves, and the title is lifted from Erik Larson's account of Berlin before the war. Two things make it the record of this board rather than a good noise-rap album. dälek have done this from Newark since 1998, which makes them the ancestor of a lane that mostly does not know it has one. And they remain the only hip-hop act on a roster built for noise rock, so the aggression here is structural rather than borrowed. A June vinyl variant ran to 300 worldwide. The gap is that a catalog this deep is still priced like a curiosity.
8.6SCORECROWNFINDHEAT 19▮
FIND — the score is ahead of the room.
BENCHMARK IN THE 50 · Chris Crack — the nearest thing on the 50, though dälek predate the lane by two decades
THE MUSA FAMILY · HEIRWAVE
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