You're Going To Be Okay Just Not Tonight
- Miles Brautigam
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
A new EP from the NYC underground singer-composer-selector
Album art taken as any indication, Guillotine is simultaneously magnetic and elusive. A luminescent glow halos the artist’s face, obscuring identity. She is standing on what appears at first glance to be an extraterrestrial surface, but upon closer inspection reveals itself as the beach at night. She's wearing black sunglasses and clad in black cloth, shimmering black hair cast over one shoulder, hips cocked exaggeratedly. From behind the camera there must be artificial light casting a long shadow and scattering a series of lens flares to complete the image. If this description makes it sound like she’s either coming from or going to a rave you’ve never heard of, pumped through a superlative sound system, it’s because she probably is, and more than likely hosting.
Guillotine, whose real name I don’t know, is a performer-promoter in the New York club scene; according to Resident Advisor, her events and DJ sets have touched down at Myrtle-Broadway area venues like Paragon, Rash, and Bossa Nova Civic Club; Bushwick / Ridgewood staples like Elsewhere, Nowadays, and House of Yes; even the high-rise Le Bain, with secret locations aplenty sprinkled across her nightlife history, including, in next month’s early days, a yet-unnamed warehouse on Ingraham Street. On Apple Music, Guillotine’s profile is the 10th result for that moniker. Secret indeed.
With the new EP, You’re Going To Be Okay Just Not Tonight, Guillotine is targeting an ambitious leap from it-girl on the scene to full-fledged recording artist, to satisfying, if mixed, results. On opener 5D, the music starts off as an ambient cinematic drone, and it stays that way, mostly, layered under ethereal humming moans worthy of Grimes; natural-worldly ribbits, coos, and chirps dance over vibrating synthesizer textures and snap-pulsing drum machines. On Offerings, we’re still in the forest, an understandably compelling fantasy for the city-dweller. Words emerge amid the far-away sounding oohs and ahhs. Albeit unintelligible, they invite the listener to lean in.
Some songs have woah-dude names like "Draped Upon the Breath of Judgement,” and “The Warfare Between Spirituality and Humanity.” Lest I get too deep in the weeds trying to parse apart meanings, I recognize that the point here is less the lyrics than the vibe. This is the kind of music I could imagine enrapturing my body during a 3am K hole. Track four, Acts of Violence, introduces a chopped up, industrial, abrasive noise we might not call hyper-pop exactly, but which surely owes something to the alternative experimental hip-hop style of JPEGMafia and Death Grips, only feminine.
In her electronic press kit, a series of images, all featuring our heroine, appear to have been made during the same waterfront photoshoot that produced the record cover. In one, she cuts a striking silhouette against the twilight. In another, though hooded and shaded, we get the glimpse of a visage in profile. A third shows a figure nude, under moonlight, washed out, spotlit, and kneeling under ocean spray. These set a tone of reserved intensity for the promising EP. I hesitate to say anything either too critical or too complimentary, lest I break the spell, or worse, be disinvited from what I’m sure are her amazing parties. Divorced from a revolutionary tribunal context, or maybe even more so in it, Guillotine (so the meme goes) would be a beautiful name for a girl.
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