PREMIERE 'anything ii [+ Mmmusic]' 22stain
Listen to 'anything ii [+ Mmmusic] ' by 22stain taken from 'isolationship' out on June 22nd via katharsis
After years of mutation, rewrites, and abandoned versions, 22stain’s debut album “isolationship” finally arrives on June 22 on the Copenhagen-based label katharsis. Moving through fragile ambient songwriting, stripped electronic textures and emotionally dissolved pop structures, the album unfolds like a strangely private world of sound slowly leaking into physical space.
Across the album, intimacy, paranoia, devotion, chemical comfort, boredom and private fantasy continuously melt together. Moments of emotional heaviness suddenly give way to strange innocence or euphoric warmth before collapsing back into exhaustion again. Some passages feel almost childlike in their openness, while others resemble fragmented late-night monologues drifting somewhere between prayer, intrusive thought and hallucination.
Much of the music feels almost unnervingly close, with subtle hints to ASMR-culture. Vocals sit directly against the listener’s ear, breaths catching, saliva shifting in the mouth, vocal cords straining against the microphone, while distant knocks, creaking doors and tiny spatial details appear with enough realism to briefly make you question whether the sounds are part of the album or coming from somewhere else in the room - hence, the isolation of the record is not only lyrical, but architectural. Entire songs seem to take place inside sealed emotional interiors where thoughts loop endlessly against the walls.
An earlier version of the project carried the title divorce drugs, a phrase that still quietly frames much of the album’s emotional logic with its double entendre. References to intoxication and dependency appear constantly throughout the record, though rarely as straightforward confession. Instead, they move through the songs like atmosphere: rituals of escape, compulsive repetition, artificial closeness, self-mythologising, bodies dissolving into symbols. Fiction and autobiography remain impossible to separate fully.
Built over several years and numerous alternate versions, the album gradually evolved through different emotional and sonic states before arriving in its final form. Earlier iterations occasionally leaned further into heavier rhythmic structures and denser disorienting productions, but the album ultimately settled into something far more exposed and emotionally porous. While deeply solitary in atmosphere, the album also features contributions from Alexander Le Ciel, Bloszum, skategoat, sweetdreams&RGB, Mmmusic and faithinself, whose appearances feel less like traditional guest spots than fleeting presences drifting through the album's emotional landscape.
Buy 'isolationship' on bandcamp
Mastering: Joel Krozer @ Six Bit Deep
Album Artwork: karl uni
Artwork for anything ii: olgee