Chasing patterns
Warnings and the like
Recognizing signs
You can see them too
Some records are best understood by the room they create around you. Hermaphrodite, the new album from Phoenix industrial artist YZBL, turns that room into a place where the walls feel close, the floor seems unstable, and every beat lands with the private force of a thought you would rather keep buried. YZBL, pronounced “Jezebel,” has carried some of this physicality since her time in industrial goth trio Tassel, yet the music here feels newly concentrated, as though every spare element has been pulled toward one central question: who gets to decide what a body means?
The album’s third single, “Patterns,” brings dub and trip-hop deeper into YZBL’s industrial vocabulary. The beat moves with a narcotic drag, leaving enough empty space for the low end to feel enormous, while the heavier passages suggest Godflesh filtered through the nocturnal unease of Tricky. There is also a funereal beauty in the surrounding textures that brings This Mortal Coil to mind, especially in the way density and delicacy can occupy the same few seconds without smoothing each other out.
Where others might find only pain in dysphoria, YZBL finds a kind of power. Androgyny and hermaphroditism are words the artist reclaims deliberately. Her interest is not in a body that is read by others, but about a life built apart from those readings entirely
Across Hermaphrodite, dysphoria runs alongside a hard-won sense of power. YZBL treats androgyny and hermaphroditism as reclaimed language, terms used to clear space away from the gaze of people eager to classify the body. Her writing approaches identity with the bodily directness of Kathy Acker: intimate, confrontational, occasionally ugly by design, and alert to the violence hidden inside ordinary categories. The record’s minimal rhythms give those ideas room to breathe, while drones and thick guitar weight make the questions feel physical rather than academic.
The album’s core ultimately challenges the binary, not only externally imposed but also internalized by the artist. “I am most transphobic towards myself,” they controversially say, describing a lifelong war fought against the idea that “difference” is wrong.
That physical unease reaches its sharpest visual form in the black-and-white video for Patterns,” made by YZBL and Ash Barrett. The camera finds her in a dark, abandoned, dungeon-like space, lit by a single bulb as she scratches marks into the surface around her. The imagery carries the raw panic of The Blair Witch Project, but its performance-art severity belongs to YZBL’s own world: part confinement, part self-documentation, part evidence left behind.
Watch the video for Patterns below:
Hermaphrodite‘s force comes from the solidarity underneath all that weight. YZBL writes from a place where no assigned category, chosen identity, or outside reading can fully contain a person. By turning that uncertainty into rhythm, pressure, and language, she makes ambiguity feel less like a void than a territory worth defending. Existing on your own terms becomes a form of possession: of the body, of the room, and finally of the name you choose to answer to.
Out now through Lana Del Rabies’ Feral Crone Recordings, the album makes its title part of the argument. The word is intentionally loaded, reclaimed, and held up as a declaration of life beyond somebody else’s categories.
Listen to Patterns below, and order Hermaphrodite here
Follow YZBL:
Instagram
YouTube
Bandcamp
Spotify
Apple Music
Follow Feral Crone Recordings:
Instagram
YouTube
Bandcamp
Substack
Website
The post “Recognizing Signs” — YZBL Descends Into the Dungeon for Video “Patterns” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
