DJ Haram’s Beside Myself is the kind of record that could only have been made in a world teetering on the brink - half diary of grief, half declaration of resistance, half inside joke told through clenched teeth. Yes, that’s three halves, but the math fits the spirit: this is music that exists in overflow, in contradiction, in the anxious doubling of being “beside oneself”.

Across its 14 tracks, Haram builds a jagged cathedral of bass, noise, and borrowed traditions. Jersey Club patterns snap against darbuka drums, punk energy snarls beside electroacoustic drones, and her own voice - poetic, bitter, tender, sardonic - threads through the chaos. This isn’t the kind of “world music” where cultures melt politely into a tasteful soup. It’s a sonic clash kitchen where saz-like tones and rattling percussion get tossed in with grime-stained synths, tape hiss, and militant beats. You can almost hear the sparks flying off the gear.

Her collaborators make the road less lonely: Moor Mother and the 700 Bliss kin bring barbed-wire lyricism; Bbymutha slides in with defiant bite; Armand Hammer pull no punches; trumpeter Aquiles Navarro blows fire through the smoke. Even when the grooves threaten to collapse under their own distortion, there’s a collective force holding the pieces together - a small, volatile community in sound.

The political undertow is everywhere, but never in the neat, hashtag-friendly way. Haram herself mocks the commodification of dissent, sneering at the way radical slogans get “yaasified” into brand aesthetics. Instead, she builds what she calls a “vulnerable shelter amidst a worsening storm”, music that refuses easy catharsis. No “joy is resistance” platitudes here - just raw, unresolved survival, jagged as an unhealed scar.

What makes Beside Myself so compelling is that it is, paradoxically, both a mirror of despair and a generator of new energy. Its pessimism is almost hopeful in its refusal to compromise. Each track is a little act of friction: bass that grumbles like collapsing concrete, verses that cut like graffiti on glass, beats that stutter and rage but never surrender to silence.

It’s unclassifiable, yet unmistakably hers. A record that won’t heal the world, as Haram admits, but will at least soundtrack the feeling of being alive inside its fractures. Think of it less as an album and more as a dispatch from the trenches: a reminder that even when the system is devouring itself, there are still frequencies left to hijack, still noises left to make.

Listening to Beside Myself feels like holding onto a burning wire. It hurts, but it’s alive. And in times like these, maybe that’s the most radical kind of music we can ask for.