FHMY, a solo experimental musician from Cairo, drops the LP The World You Grew Up In No Longer Exists, a bracingly intimate record that folds math rock, post-rock, emo, shoegaze, and IDM into a single statement. Rooted in childhood samples, with anime chimes, gaming motifs, and dusty film snippets, the album maps abandonment, male isolation, dysmorphia, and nostalgia with a clinical tenderness and leads you to be unsettled.
Opening cut โEgyptian Footballโ shimmers with layered guitars and bustling drums while a thick, drenched wail untethers memories that canโt be reclaimed, as in the line, โLooking at the white ceiling,โ which comes as an interior monologue watching life slide past. Meanwhile, โmy blue heavenโ (with AQL) sits you in a dreamy chiming haze where the pleading voice, โHow much I would have loved you, if only youโd let meโ becomes a study in yearning that wonโt resolve.
The title instrumental offers jazzy contours that let listeners project their own small apocalypse, an elegant palate cleanser before the cerebral, โDo Humans Dream of Electric Sheep?โ which interrogates consumer simulacra with brittle IDM textures and a Baudrillardian sting. The closer, nodding to its namesake, confronts suicidal rumination head-on, with the fragmented refrain, โI am afraid to dโ,โ flipping between tenderness and unnerving thoughts crawling under the skin.
The LP utilizes the mnemonics to locate trauma in the media that raised us. Swans and Slint peek through in the recordโs dynamic heft, yet FHMYโs real power is emotional translation, as he doesnโt console so much as render inner wreckage into sound. Put simply, this is bleak, beautiful, and stubbornly memorable. Listen to it on Spotify.
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Review by: Naomi Joan