Slikback has always sounded like someone cracking open the motherboard of club music and soldering wires where none were supposed to go. With "Attrition", his first full-length for Planet Mu, he turns that restless tinkering into a cinematic epic - a record that feels like both a sci-fi blockbuster and a particularly tense round of a survival video game. It’s music built not just to be heard but to be inhabited, complete with sonic trapdoors, jump scares, and moments of eerie stillness where you’re not sure if the system has frozen or if the monster is just crouching right behind you.

The backstory matters here: caught in the liminal waiting room of a visa application after moving from Kenya to Poland, newly married and with a newborn at home, Slikback found himself slowed down, unshackled from the frantic churn of touring and self-releasing. Instead of producing in bursts, he sculpted with patience, feeding each track until it grew teeth. Working with Planet Mu also added another strange tension - the institutional discipline of feedback and schedules, which paradoxically freed him to push ideas further, to polish them until they shone like dangerous gemstones.

Musically, "Attrition" doesn’t so much draw from genres as weaponize them. The skeletal menace of Gqom, the lurch of dubstep, the iron lung of hardcore techno, the serrated edges of tech-step - all melted down into alloys of unfamiliar density. Early tracks tease with relative calm, but before long you’re hurled into serrated 140bpm passages, where percussion scatters like shrapnel and synths drip neon venom. Midway, “Taped” shuffles the deck with rolling 160bpm basslines that glow like radioactive thunderclouds, and by the time you reach “Fracture” the whole album combusts in a final act of elegant annihilation.

What makes it remarkable isn’t just the violence, though - it’s the beauty inside it. The details shimmer: a hiss that sounds like a snake breathing, a chord that flickers like a dying light bulb, the sudden silence that lands heavier than any bass drop. It’s a record of contradictions: alien yet intimate, brutal yet carefully composed, chaotic yet precise.

Planet Mu has long been a home for artists who redraw the club’s architecture - think Jlin, Ital Tek, or the label’s early grime and footwork chapters. With "Attrition", Slikback earns his seat at that table while also sawing the legs off it, reshaping the banquet into something more volatile, more volatile, more his own.

This isn’t just a highlight of his career - it’s a reminder that some of the most futuristic music comes from pauses, from attrition itself, from the grinding patience of waiting until the system finally lets you through.