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• Deviancy [Grimalkin, 2019] A
• God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It [Grimalkin, 2020] ★
• Only Dust Remains [Grimalkin, 2024] B+

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Deviancy [Grimalkin, 2019]
Raised in Zambia and sent off to British Columbia for a computer science degree, the trans woman Ashanti Mutinta then relocated to Montreal and in 2018 released two Bandcamp-streamable suck-an-MC hip-hop EPs that knew their way around: F.R.E.A.K.S (try "Pink Bandana") and the more assured Black Sailor Moon ("Voodoo" or "Aesthetic"). With its eight tracks clocking in at a shade over 20 minutes, this 2019 EP is a leap forward so chocked with content that it feels like an album. Undermining horrorcore's nihilist-cum-neanderthal devil worship by identifying with the leftwing humanists of the Satanic Temple, her "Bad Juju" aims a middle finger at a patriarchy she blames by name and her "Devil in a Moshpit" calls out the sexual predators who lurk in scrums she knows too well. Nor is she afraid to admit that sometimes she's afraid. "You Like My Body the Way It Is" is a love song that ventures into unfamiliar territory: "Maybe it's my boobs they could be a little bigger/Maybe it's my cooch they could seam it a little different." And the closing "Burn Me at the Stake" reminds us of what she already knows full well--that the suppression of her kind of gender defiance has an especially hideous history. A

God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It [Grimalkin, 2020]
Polaris Music Prize-winning rapper deploys the black-metal arts to explain her sexuality to the African family that believed it was christening a boychild ("Black Sheep," "Amen") ★

Only Dust Remains [Grimalkin, 2024]
Just as a rapper, the Zambian-Canadian trans woman a/k/a Ashanti Mutinta is one of a kind. But not because her medium-tempo delivery is notably fluent or percussive. Fact is, it's a little of both, though I expect its pitch and timbre would present masculine to most new listeners. What it wouldn't present is well-gauged or powerful—there's something approaching an audible agony here that's reinforced by background textures with a density to them. Aside from an almost tossed-in "from the river to the sea," the danger that surfaces is existential rather than political, and while both her music and her affect imply pervasive, imminent social peril, what exactly she proposes to do about a world on the brink is left unsaid. B+