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 “Egyptian Football” shimmers with layered guitars and bustling drums while a thick, drenched wail untethers memories that can’t be reclaimed, as in the line, “Looking at the white ceiling,” which comes as an interior monologue watching life slide past. Meanwhile, “my blue heaven” (with AQL) sits you in a dreamy chiming haze where the pleading voice, “How much I would have loved you, if only you’d let me” becomes a study in yearning that won’t resolve.
The title instrumental offers jazzy contours that let listeners project their own small apocalypse, an elegant palate cleanser before the cerebral, “Do Humans Dream of Electric Sheep?” 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, “I am afraid to d–,” 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 record’s dynamic heft, yet FHMY’s real power is emotional translation, as he doesn’t 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