Dalek - By Any Means Necessary

I got a letter from the government

The other day

I opened and read it

t said they were suckers

(Public Enemy – Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos)

Let's start with the basics: Dälek is pronounced Die-a-leck, all run together and a bit chewed up, in not exactly academic American speech. To be precise, we're in New Jersey, in the year of grace 1998: Will Brooks aka MC Dälek and Alap Momin aka The Oktopus are two African-Americans raised in the suburbs, fairly middle-class after all, eating Public Enemy for breakfast and My Bloody Valentine for lunch. It's a rich diet, and Will isn't exactly in shape - he's a big guy, far from slender, but he carries his bulk around with pride. His gaze, though, is anything but calm, and once he started writing rhymes, don't even ask. It's like punching a boxing bag and getting even more fired up because you can't manage to knock it down.

The situation is tense.

Making hip-hop has for some years now been the favorite sport of the colored population - the names are endless, and so, often, is the hot air: a scene stuck in money, drugs and women. If this were "Scarface", we'd already have the whole picture, but unfortunately it's a bunch of brain-dead Black guys competing over who can rack up the most airtime on Mtv.

Will and Alap don't take well to the media exposure of the worst side of what they and their brothers are; they take even worse the Reaganism that has governed America for over a decade - the name changes, but the method is always the same: give free rein to those with money and silence to everyone else. The easiest solution would be to go after those who have the money, but out there in New Jersey, they like to do things their own way. Dälek and Oktopus figured they could play hip-hop in a newly intelligent way, offering something personal and sincere, able to convey the resentment they felt toward a ruling class interested only in glorifying itself while clubbing people in the streets.

Negro Necro Nekros came out on Gern Blandsten in October 1998, and it's a somewhat odd release, especially for a micro-label that usually puts out post-hardcore: anyone who hears the duo's work can't say for sure how much of it is hip-hop, as opposed to industrial or shoegaze.

The fact is that Negro Necro Nekros marks the beginning of the journey, laying the best possible foundations for dälek's future, fusing the verbosity of hardcore rap, the sampledelic attitude of Eric B. and Terminator X, and an absolutely sick use of delay, distortion pedals and little percussion touches. "Praise Be The Man" closes the record and is everything dälek will become, the seed from which their best creations will grow, with that agonizing intro, the metallic beat sunk beneath mega-bass, distortion and back-vocals that pop up out of nowhere. Will raps with monstrous force, his cavernous tone of voice the war cry of someone tired of being screwed over, who knows the only way to get back at the system is to know more and more. To be conscious.

The reception for this debut is excellent: they don't chart and MTV couldn't care less; that's fine, cracking the Billboard top 10 was never exactly the goal, but the press praises them, and a genuine cult following starts to build around the band. Live, they keep the gain cranked to +10 like a metal act, their stage presence limited to lining up beats and words, zero filler on the side. They build a reputation as a combative band, and start breaking down the doors of fans who would never otherwise have listened to a hip-hop record.

Their touring takes them all over America, they come to know distant realities, to see firsthand what they themselves, having since moved to New York, live under: the rule of Rudolph Giuliani and his Zero Tolerance policy. The Abner Louima case had broken out shortly before the release of Negro Necro Nekros, and the killing of Amadou Diallo followed just a few months later. The United States is obsessed with security, with rampant crime, with rape, and the only way to convince people to vote for your party is to sell them the promise of greater safety.

Meanwhile, in their wanderings, the pair meet the person who will give their career a jolt: Mike Patton, in his role as owner of Ipecac Records. They share a punk attitude and forge an artistic bond that endures to this day, becoming one of the label's flagship bands.

dälek and Oktopus, as we said, draw in an extremely wide-ranging audience, and in 2000 they release the first in a series of split EPs with a different band each time. Opening the series is the most abrasive outfit around in the world of beatmaking: Techno Animal, who, without needing too elaborate a description, are essentially two metalheads fleeing toward hip-hop. Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin, already known as God and Godflesh, if you please. The result is MegatonClassical Homicide, originals from one side plus remixes from the other and vice versa, like taking a straight punch from Tyson right out of the shower. The future is bleak, but artistically bright.

If Afrika Bambaataa wasn’t influenced by Kraftwerk, we wouldn’t have ‘Planet Rock.’ So, in that sense, what we do is strictly hip-hop.

(dälek, interview for the Chicago Sun-Times)

The dälek sound keeps transforming, the sharp but stretched-out atmospheres of the debut starting to get compressed. From Filthy Tongues Of Gods and Griots arrives in 2002 and already marks a first shift in approach: Dj Still, a scratcher from the New York scene, joins the lineup, and the record is put together very slowly, with early pieces already existing back in the days of Negro Necro Nekros, having passed through the years undergoing changes in form and substance, reworkings of the lyrics and the sound, to make everything sound tighter, more defined, to take on a clear direction.

The power of Oktopus's production keeps growing, layering pattern on pattern, distorting, stretching, equalizing and separating: the beat on one side, chaos on the other, with dälek at the center like a giant black battering ram. "Spiritual Healing" sounds like Faust if they'd grown up in the 80s listening to Run DMC, while working a grinder, with the terrible habit of sampling its sound.

The craft here is meticulous, the lyrics cut clean and clear into American society, lashing out at Rudy Giuliani, the 49 shots fired by police, September 11, 2001 and the failure of intelligence. There's no fear in taking a stand, no more time to stay quiet chasing after nonsense. The hip-hop on Filthy Tongue is the essence of hip-hop itself: it moves from old school breaks, the most classic "tumtum-cha" even if buried under a blanket of distortion, through to "Black Smoke Rises", a funereal twelve-minutes-and-twelve-seconds lament of sonic counterpoints and oxygen-less immersion, the words flowing with no fixed rhythm, form doesn't exist, there's only rap substance, samples, work on sound.

The title of this record refers to "griots", traditional African storytellers, and that's exactly what was described above. Reality through metaphor, what society is through a "fable", a tale. But it's also about God, and this record has a lot to do with spirituality, with searching, with doubt and absence. If the brutal approach is the norm, "Forever Close My Eyes" is the exception, a strange flicker of melancholy stamped with the dälek mark. Clean guitars, a backing track with a much more human feeling, the wall of sound pushed into the background this time, a hint of a central theme, a chorus. Suddenly a pair of Black rappers think they're the My Bloody Valentine of the new millennium and churn out a modern gospel shoegaze complete with church organ.

The two reach a clearly defined modus operandi, producing a sound all their own that no one else manages to get close to while staying sharp. Will and Alap are at the controls of a tank, with no intention whatsoever of easing up.

Who trades his culture for dollars?

The fool or the scholar?

Griot? Poet? Or White collared?

(dälek – "Culture For Dollars")

Kid606 with Kevin Martin on sax, Faust, the idm collective Velma — all split releases, all Eps, all about contaminating your own sound with that of whoever's standing across from you. Sometimes it works well, sometimes so-so, let's not split hairs over it. The short format isn't really suited to two wordy types like them, but it keeps them sharp, and they start building a name for themselves as remixers too, with plenty of people lining up to work with them.

But first there's their own thing to take care of: the third album in seven years, which calls for calm and order, because the project is a big one.

The rage fuelling their rhymes has had its ups and downs over the years, as artistic commitments on an ever-growing number of fronts drain energy from a political radar like Dälek: the invasion of Iraq happened, then Afghanistan, fake dossiers came to light, contradictory theses, proclamations of lasting freedom and the hunt for the bad guy. It takes space and time to do things properly, but time is running out and the urgency keeps growing.

In the studio Oktopus has gone wild, chewing on rust while listening to Einsturzende Neubauten, Faust, Can, hardcore and sludge-metal; he's increasingly fascinated by industrial, wandering around with a microphone doing field recordings, assembling, taking apart and reassembling. The beat is second nature to him by now, and he focuses on giving his sound even more depth. Dj Still backs him up, the turntable becomes a sheet of metal to scratch the needle against, pedals everywhere — it's pure madness.

Like a modern-day Malcolm X, Dälek writes his accusatory masterpiece, slicing in half everything within reach; there's no hope in his words, the world is in the hands of idiots, and they're winning.

Absence is the third album in seven years, and it's the perfect number: the sonic assault is complete, the distorted guitars have become construction-site tools buried in feedback and distortion, the voice stands on the podium calling out the defendants and sealing the verdict. Hip-hop has never been as alive in Dälek's mouth, in Oktopus's head and in Still's hands — it's the most hip-hop thing the trio have ever made: the beats are circular, one loop after another with the whole world imploding inside them, the flow counterpointed by scratches, pauses and restarts just like those who called themselves public enemy once taught.

Dälek used to be the caged beast at the centre of the city; now the gate is smashed open and the reckoning has finally arrived.

Absence comes out and all hell breaks loose. The trio has a devastating impact on critical opinion: if they were well regarded before, now they're elevated to venerable status, having not just met but overtaken their own ambitions. Techno Animal had tried to reach this level of complexity but hadn't pulled it off — something was still missing, something Dälek managed to find by throwing their eyes, ears and heart wide open.

But the lesson isn't complete in Absence, or rather, the lesson is there but the afterword is missing — there's a need to understand where and how certain intuitions were born, and that's where that crew of lively old-timers called Faust comes into play. Derbe Respct, Alder comes out just a few months after Abscence and is a slab of kraut hip-hop, a devastating crossover between the New Jersey trio's fury and the madness of the German survivors.

What's most striking is the two acts' ability to take each other's sound apart, merging and conversing as a single entity, magically avoiding the sense of being able to tell who's working on whose sounds. Faust+Dälek become a single unit that drills into the listener's skull for about an hour, through progressions, digressions and well-steered chaos.

After watching Faust go on the road with a crew of New Jersey black guys, for a lot of music writers the time for retirement seems to have arrived.

Success lasts for seconds

Our future's forsaken

Blatant lies of Bourgeois

Seeps into vacant

Eyes out of focus

Only see what they told us

World of weight’s on our shoulders

(Dälek – “Ever Somber”)

In the summer of 2005, DJ Still left the group; his scratching had become an integral part of the sound, and even though he stood in the shadow of the two owners of the name, he had managed to add an even more personal touch to the final result, using the turntable as a genuine instrument, conversing with everything around him, even helping the MC by countering Dälek's lines with vocal samples.

The aftermath of Absence is a strange moment: all sorts of spotlights unexpectedly turn on, invitations to high-profile festivals, collaboration requests, their own recording studio just steps from Manhattan jammed with bookings, from wannabe-MC kids all the way to Mr. Sitek of Tv On The Radio, who shares Oktopus's obsessive approach to production.

After every record the project has seen its fame grow, having to deal with people exploiting their music and clueless journalists suddenly turned hip-hop experts.

George W. Bush is more and more convinced he made the best possible choices, among them surviving a poorly swallowed pretzel. The world is dealing with ever greater pressure on environmental issues, the fuel crisis, and with every step another little hole in the ozone layer. Meanwhile the United States of America keeps leaving bullets and victims on the ground, both abroad and within its own borders, in the name of a security now threatened by an enemy thousands of miles away, invisible to ordinary people yet always ready and always near.

With anthrax, with bombings in Madrid or London, with a solid press campaign, fear of the outsider is stoked: “Suspicious faces when the foreigner walks by,” as Sangue Misto used to say.

Abandoned Language arrives two years later, with a collaboration and a tour alongside our own Zu in between. But the atmosphere we find on the album has changed: the distortions and walls of metallic noise are gone, replaced by distant horns and strings, endlessly recurring, building mantras over which the beat pushes gently. The sound becomes far more insidious and soft, but it's on the more avant-garde side that the most malevolent blows, the deepest wounds, are found: “Content To Play Villain”, dissonant disorientation, out-acid-jazz, Cabaret Voltaire and Nurse With Wound. Close to the abstraction of cLOUDDEAD. No more violent spasms. Just a mantra. Hypnotic. “Eraserhead” in your head, until you're lost among free-falling strings and atonal crackling, in a Xenakis-like miasma of reverb hovering undecided between the infernal and the celestial (“Lynch”).

Abandonment and flight become the punishment to inflict: those who flee from themselves, and those who flee so they no longer have to give anything to anyone, to anyone who might misuse it. The abandonment and the impossible flight from the reality that surrounds and daily assaults millions of people find, on Abandoned Language, their own narrative, a logical thread despite everything.

The surprise is considerable, and despite the inconsistencies of a record with a more human face than its predecessors, the result still speaks of human beings, never losing focus on flesh, blood and sweat.

The Dälek war machine comes to a halt for a while. A tour, this time more modest than in the past, a compilation of previously released remixes, time to recharge because the next outing promises to be an important one: before long, a Black man from Chicago might just be running the USA.

We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki! And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye.

(Reverend Jeremiah Wright, sermon)

“Blessed Are They Who Bash Your Children's Heads Against A Rock” is the opening track of Gutter Tactics, and it's pure ol'skool that struts along smugly, underscored by the words of Reverend Jeremiah Wright: “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, we killed far more than the thousands of people who died between New York and the Pentagon, and yet we never batted an eye.” More than an opener, it's a declaration of war.

Gutter Tactics is exactly what you'd expect, yet it still overwhelms; some things change, but the modus operandi stays the same. There's less solitude, the world is no longer a frozen ball adrift in the universe, Dälek raps far more hardcore than before, returning to the style of Gods And Griots, and never lets up: it's a train of resentment and blood chasing its own rage, going wherever that rage wants it to go.

Gutter Tactics are the tactics of flow, like a street rapper's cheat sheet written by someone who wanted to make shoegaze but was born Black and pissed off. But there's hope this time, a light at the end of the tunnel on “Atypical Stereotype”, an appeal to whoever we might be able to reach: “you change things, I'll change my stories.”

To stand on one side, always.

I saw a man yesterday,

Snub-nosed .38 to temple test his fate

And lose.

I had the same new balance shoes

I wonder what size?

Recorded in the heart of 2005, shortly before the release of Still and shortly after the release of Absence (so before Deadverse Massive, Abandoned Language and Gutter Tactics), and available only in a limited run for the beloved Latitudes series on Southern Records, the forty-four minutes of Untitled make up their most solemn stream of consciousness, in which Middle Eastern elements, gaseous clusters of rap vocabulary (a colossal Prefuse73), shocking silences and dissonant arrangements collide while remaining pure collisions of random gestalt, their final and most important artistic nadir, and black music's first Dantean descent.

In 2016, after signing to Profound Lore Records (a label usually devoted to metal-adjacent productions) and after bringing two new collaborators into the fold (DJ rEK and Mike Swarmbots), MC Dälek is ready to release new, restless dispatches from his hip-hop universe.

Asphalt For Eden (which makes the trio's sound definitively "classic," without pushing beyond the peaks reached in the past) opens in medias res, with a "Shattered" that's an infallible but predictable trademark, all elastic flow and noisy backdrops where melancholy and wonder are shot through with a dark splendor. It's the sound, as we know, of the gradual decay of a world that our heroes keep observing from a safe distance, offering revolt as the only possible weapon ("Guaranteed Struggle") and opening cracks toward the past along hypnagogic ridges that hover in the grip of melodic fevers ("Masked Laughter (Nothing's Left)"). On "Critical," the union-clash between the force of the beats and the slippery spell of the backdrops probably reaches its point of greatest balance, while the instrumental "6dB" travels cinematic paths that widen the spectrum of introspection.

Elsewhere, dilated, floating atmospheres ("Control," "It Just Is") seem to announce new expressive possibilities, resolving the vehemence of their more politicized tracks into a murky mix of imaginary landscapes, memories buried under years upon years of rubble, and nightmares transfigured into bittersweet hypnosis. As if to say that, to reach happiness, you have to walk down roads where the asphalt gets progressively hotter.

With the new line-up now road-tested, Will Brooks and his two collaborators produce the longer Endangered Philosophies (2017), with which they officially confirm their comeback (helped also by their return to Ipecac). The trio turns out still-powerful tracks, "Echoes Of…" (a fine example of what could be labeled noise-doom), "Few Understand," a genuine j'accuse against the ignorant masses punctuated by petulant dissonances in the style of Public Enemy, and a new minor classic, "A Collective Cancelled Thought," an angry sermon wrapped in a long electroacoustic ride. Lesser tracks ("Battlecries," "Weapons," "Beyond The Madness," "The Son Of Immigrants") range instead from ambient psychedelia to forms essentially reconciled with tonality and even melody, also paying tribute to their old-school roots ("Nothing Stays Permanent"), and even brushing up against the soul ballad ("Numb"). Their historic cacophonous assault, here held back and at times dreamy, makes the project a touch more mellow, but — even lacking real sabotage and leaning on a sound-designer's polish — the message and the music still come across as powerful.

The album they were supposed to release in 2020 was abandoned due to organizational problems stemming from COVID-19. A new album, Precipice, arrives only in 2022: it plays on slow tempos and dreamlike atmospheres that dial the aggression down a notch. More recently, HAYWARDxDÄLEK (2025) saw them collaborate with Charles Hayward, where the crucial contribution of the This Heat drummer compresses the band's style, which often stays in the background. It's a transitional period, one that ultimately leads to Brilliance Of A Falling Moon (2026). The formula has essentially remained that same blend of industrial and rhythmic, cacophonous and political elements that made them great between the two millennia and that probably culminated in the masterpiece Absence, now over twenty years old — though the outlook of catastrophe has given way to a more subdued, desperate and spectral vision.

In the context of a dangerously violent and fascistic world, made up of Donald Trump and new dictators, distorted information and the commodification of art, Dälek return to bitterly comment on the hypocrisy of those who represent us and to reaffirm their stubborn opposition to discrimination, war, authoritarian drift and the trivialization of the message.

MC Dälek and Mike Mare use a hip-hop steeped in noise and distortion, evocatively ghostly, as the vehicle for this new attack on the system — perhaps not as abrasive as their peaks and certainly incapable of surprising anyone who already knows them well, but still, unfortunately, necessary. The only possible opposition to the system, they seem to say, must start from the acknowledgment that we're living through a dark period, where the night is lit by a dramatically waning Moon.

Contributions by Antonio Silvestri ("Precipice," "HAYWARDxDÄLEK" and "Brilliance Of A Falling Moon")

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