What happens when hypermasculinity meets queer culture?
For a while, electronic music became too polite for its own good. What began as a language forged in marginal spaces slowly adapted to more curated environments, where friction was softened and identity became aesthetic rather than lived experience. Mertder arrives as a refusal of that shift, not by stepping away from the dancefloor, but by reintroducing tension into it. His work resists clear genre boundaries. Electronic structures hold everything together, but the voice moves differently, closer to a chant than a performance, somewhere between spoken word and rap. The result is less a fusion and more a collision, where London’s underground meets something older and more insistent, shaped by repetition, rhythm, and cultural inheritance.
This is where his project shifts from sound into something more structural. What Mertder stages is a negotiation of identity in real time. Hypermasculinity and queer flamboyance are not presented as opposites to be resolved, but as forces that coexist and destabilise each other. In a moment where masculinity is increasingly flattened into content and ideology online, this tension reads as a refusal. Not softer or more inclusive in any predictable sense, but more unstable, less obedient to a script. It suggests that masculinity is not something to perform correctly, but something that fractures, overlaps, and resists coherence altogether.
That instability sits at the core of Carnal Riot. The EP frames the self not as something to discover, but as something to dismantle and rebuild. “Hussy” opens with an internal confrontation, exposing how easily external judgement becomes self-policing. From there, the project moves outward. “Glass” reflects the exhaustion of political language that repeats without consequence, where transparency feels staged rather than real. “Whoredom” shifts into the space where desire becomes political terrain, pushing against systems that attempt to regulate bodies while quietly relying on the same impulses they condemn. There is humour, but it works as pressure, not relief, forcing contradictions into view rather than softening them.
By the time “Geisha” arrives, the focus turns to the artist as a figure caught between expression and service, expected to create connection while navigating their own fragmentation. What makes Mertder compelling is not simply the themes he engages with, but the way he repositions electronic music as a space where these tensions can exist without resolution. The dancefloor becomes less about escape and more about confrontation. Movement does not dissolve meaning, it intensifies it. Carnal Riot aligns with a wider shift among artists reclaiming electronic music as a site of resistance through pressure rather than nostalgia. The question is no longer whether music can carry weight, but whether we are willing to meet it where it becomes uncomfortable.