You won’t find it in the gift shops or on the tourist board website, but amnesia is about as precise a postcard of a certain side of London as you’ll find. While on paper this is a transatlantic link-up—Jawnino is from South London, while the production collective Surf Gang reps New York—it was recorded entirely in the UK capital, and these hazy London conjurings are hugely evocative of the city. Songs are littered with knowingly niche local references: tiny east London pub-clubs, competing rap rivals from the DVD era. But beyond these details, amnesia—in its blend of moody cloud rap, club trap, and stormy breaks—also invokes a specific malaise that has squatted over the UK for the last stagnating decade. It’s the aural equivalent of being folded into the sofa, having a nice, long doomscroll.
The EP conjures, in particular, those liminal hours that stretch from club to couch. The synths on opener “40pageant” trickle like rain down a steamy bus window, while Jawnino skids over a scratchy breakbeat. His noncommittal drawl on “telly on the blink” sits somewhere between John Glacier’s trippy streams of consciousness and Giggs’ sullen cadence during road rap’s late aughts peak. And if the general vibe wasn’t enough to get this point across, there’s a track called “bored of the uk” (refrain: “I’m so bored of the UK”) that drags the close sweatiness of Room 2 into your living room, and captures the feeling of the buzz slowly wearing off. It’s music for soggy weather, sticky spliffs, and stunted ambitions. If living for the weekend used to be about working a 9-5 to fund your weekend bender of booze, birds, and bust-ups—the type once chronicled by Mike Skinner with the Streets—then Jawnino and Surf Gang paint a modern day equivalent that is more about clubbing yourself into a seven-day settee slump.
