You won’t find it in the gift shops or on the tourist board website, but amnesia is about as precise a postcard of a certain side of London as you’ll find. While on paper this is a transatlantic link-up—Jawnino is from South London, while the production collective Surf Gang reps New York—it was recorded entirely in the UK capital, and these hazy London conjurings are hugely evocative of the city. Songs are littered with knowingly niche local references: tiny east London pub-clubs, competing rap rivals from the DVD era. But beyond these details, amnesia—in its blend of moody cloud rap, club trap, and stormy breaks—also invokes a specific malaise that has squatted over the UK for the last stagnating decade. It’s the aural equivalent of being folded into the sofa, having a nice, long doomscroll.
The EP conjures, in particular, those liminal hours that stretch from club to couch. The synths on opener “40pageant” trickle like rain down a steamy bus window, while Jawnino skids over a scratchy breakbeat. His noncommittal drawl on “telly on the blink” sits somewhere between John Glacier’s trippy streams of consciousness and Giggs’ sullen cadence during road rap’s late aughts peak. And if the general vibe wasn’t enough to get this point across, there’s a track called “bored of the uk” (refrain: “I’m so bored of the UK”) that drags the close sweatiness of Room 2 into your living room, and captures the feeling of the buzz slowly wearing off. It’s music for soggy weather, sticky spliffs, and stunted ambitions. If living for the weekend used to be about working a 9-5 to fund your weekend bender of booze, birds, and bust-ups—the type once chronicled by Mike Skinner with the Streets—then Jawnino and Surf Gang paint a modern day equivalent that is more about clubbing yourself into a seven-day settee slump.
Neat as these portraits are, they’re uniformly fleeting—gone just as soon as they’ve arrived, like passengers hopping on and off Underground train cars, or another vertical video flicked on with a nonchalant thumb. This can leave elements of amnesia feeling like a first draft. There’s “glebe”’s eternal drift and lazy rhymes; “glitzince” gestures at an urban ennui rather than paint a convincing image of it. “contest” sounds like a loading screen, glittery looping keys and pitter-pat percs stuck in time; not necessarily a bad thing, but not what you’re there for either. It’s a little bit mood board: all broad direction, but without the actual aspirations. And, yes, partly that’s the point. An affect: Jawnino sprawls on the beat, couched so deep between beats and bass that his voice becomes just another instrument moulding the gloom. But when a track like “alise” pierces the languor with its writhing hi-hats, drops of color, and visions of “Kylie Minogue at Butlins,” you get a hint of where this could all go with a shift of gears.
Most of these songs could fit within a YouTube Short. And they are ripe for bingeing: Played on a loop, Jawnino’s nonchalant bars about afterparties or pubs or designer drugs burrow into your brain. The beats are inoffensive, cosy even. Before you know it, it’s turned dark outside and the only glow in the room is coming from your phone and the tip of a cigarette dwindling in a makeshift beer-can ashtray. And Jawnino is riding that breakbeat again.