Nukuluk: the South London group delving into alienation and otherness through experimental hip-hop

Right now, the worlds of UK hip hop and indie are colliding faster and faster like never before. The inimitable Black Fondu takes his cue from bands like Xiu Xiu and has toured with Fat Dog, while bands like Enola Gay are fusing commanding rap with blistering noise rock. And South London collective Nukuluk – with their glitchy synths, visceral live shows and intimate approach to production – are emerging as the UK experimental hip hop scene’s leading lights.

Who else would give you urgent boom-bap paired with pitched-up, hyperpop vocals as on ‘Covered In Gold’? Or the frazzled electroclash beats that give way to the droning, melancholic trip-hop passages of ‘Ooh Ah’? And what about the unrelenting, metallic abrasion of ‘Kick Snare’? Their brand-new mixtape ‘Stillworld’ doesn’t let up, either, mixing the thrillingly discordant (‘Crashing’) with the angelic and heartfelt (‘Faith’).

In early November, NME meets three members of Nukuluk at The Albany, a community arts centre in Deptford, where vocalist Syd Nukuluk was previously a young artist. It’s also not too far away from where they first met. Syd and rapper Monika connected through mutual friends in Forest Hill, where Syd convinced Monika to try rapping and where Syd would later poach drummer Louis Grace from another project. (The collective are rounded out by bassist Mateo Villanueva Brandt.)

After dropping their debut EP ‘Disaster Pop’ in 2021, Nukuluk had some difficulty finding their footing, as exemplified by a rather awkward set at Reading & Leeds’ BBC 1Xtra stage in 2022. “There were thousands of 15-year-olds expecting some drill looking at us like, ‘who the hell is this?’” Syd laughs.

But it was after a slot later that year opening for Injury Reserve at Pitchfork Music Festival London where the state of the British experimental rap scene really began to weigh on them. “Louis went home after that gig and was like, ‘nah… Injury Reserve are too good!’” Syd recalls. The next day, the drummer “channelled” that experience into a beat, which would become the ‘Stillworld’ track ‘Son of Star’. It’s one of several songs on the mixtape that asks: “Who made me?” For a collective as unique as Nukuluk, that question is growing more pertinent by the day.

“I take my feelings and I’m like: let’s imagine something powerful and fantastical coming out of it” – Monika

“One thing that I have with Syd is that I experience his life very intensely – which is a bit strange,” Monika reveals. “I find myself reacting to stuff that has happened to him as if that happened to me, and they become huge questions in my own head.”

The uncommon intensity of the relationships within Nukuluk turn their songs into something like maypoles which their narratives wind around. Take the exploration of fatherhood and paternity on ‘Stillworld’. Syd’s father died during the making of the mixtape; he was a punk, and a Roland synth he had gifted Syd as well as various plugins he’d recommended can be heard on the record.

Meanwhile, Monika’s father was a “great guy”, but his “relative absence” left its own mark on him. Though he and Syd are both 29, Monika sometimes sees his bandmate as a father figure of sorts. “He introduced me to music, he taught me everything. He believed in me when there was no one,” Monika says. “So then it’s like… this guy made me. Like, who is it? Who am I? And I think that’s why the question comes back to me all the time throughout the record.”

Contemplating and bonding over their otherness also spurred Nukuluk to make experimental hip hop. Monika grew up in France with a Cameroonian mother, and upon moving to the UK, realised there was “more space for my weirdness.” He reflects on how he responded to mainstream conversations about race: “You receive the conversation as someone trying to define you, and you get pissed off. So you’re weird because you’re Black and everybody treats you weird. And then you hear things about Blackness that you don’t recognise yourself with and then you’re just pissed off – so you want to be weirder.”

“I feel like you have that [weirdness],” he says to Syd, who concurs: “I did so much guitar music for years and it didn’t feel expressive enough. I was a superfan of Elliot Smith and the way he expresses quite rage, for example, but doing that with an acoustic guitar has been done by many, many people.” With Nukuluk, Syd says, he’s opened up avenues for “new forms of communication” for himself, especially in portrayals of male vulnerability on songs like ‘Raining’ and ‘Taxidermy’. “[Portraying] that scared but broken person but in a different way, that mix makes it feel like it’s going to connect with people more.”

It’s that combined understanding of outsiderness which lends to Nukuluk’s lyricism on ‘Stillworld’ its surreal, supernatural bent. In ‘Crashing’, Monika describes “speeding past the speed of sound” to save a relationship, while ‘Hand On The Hilt’ sees him locked in a perpetual battle between trust and fear: “I been cutting foes like dream punches hit”.

“You know how anime is basically a teen at the center of the world?” Monika asks rhetorically. “It’s always like, we take this teen, we make the fate of the world depend on them, and then we give them powers that they need in order to achieve their purpose. That’s what I do: I take my feelings and I’m like, let’s imagine something powerful and fantastical coming out of it.”

Syd, meanwhile, is more into “sad novels, noir movies and depressive mundanity”, citing Yegveny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We as an example, set in a city with walls made of glass: “These sinister cityscapes relate to how I feel living in London and as a slightly troubled, traumatised person, seeing an unwelcoming world and having these more speculative futures. It’s quite expressive and conveys paranoia, but also you can see beauty in the darkness of things.”

“There’s people brewing who are sort of our level, making really intentional alternative hip-hop. But there is no blueprint, really” – Syd

Nukuluk produce all their songs themselves, which means they can make their sound incredibly personal – and experimental. ‘Raining’, for instance, samples a previous ambient song they’d made; Syd gifted the reworked instrumental to Monika for his birthday, who laid down a verse the day after, and Grace finished the production. “The fact that we don’t have external producers and we take turns producing means that there’s no hierarchy,” Syd explains. “The sound can really, really flip, and maybe a traditional band doesn’t have that freedom in quite the same way – you have more limitations.”

One limitation that Nukuluk are grappling with is the smallness of the scene they’ve found themselves in. “There’s not really that bed of hip-hop to experiment from here, I guess,” Syd acknowledges. “Now it’s starting to happen. But people love it and they can’t hear local people making that music, so it definitely makes sense for it to pollinate here.”

Though they have previously played at longstanding indie venues like The Windmill and The George Tavern, Nukuluk remain slightly out of place – and the isolation can be difficult to ignore. “It’s hard not to get caught up in it, especially when all your friends are playing in different things which occupy that space,” Grace points out. “You pull each other up. And that’s what community is and we really appreciate that. I think it has been hard. We tried, but it’s hard to find that space.”

In some ways, Nukuluk are still outsiders. But that’s perhaps the greatest indicator that nobody is doing it quite like them, and that their future is wide open. “There’s people brewing who are sort of our level, making really intentional alternative hip-hop,” says Syd. “But there is no blueprint, really.”

Nukuluk’s ‘Stillworld’ is out now via Colorburst Records

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