A gothic emo cyberpunk soundtrack for a fairy out for revenge.
It’s been almost four years since Ashnikko went viral with her TikTok-esque feature track “Stupid” with Yung Baby Tate. Debut mixtape DEMIDEVIL followed, young people were enthralled by Ashton Casey and her anime-inspired aesthetic. The successor WEEDKILLER is not only called that, but also bangs at Ex like a bottle of weed killer. Flaming basses, cutting vocals, thick beats are the means of choice of the native American, who lives in London, to tell a post-apocalyptic fantasy epic.
Well, nothing else was to be expected from Ash but ants under the skin, rotting bones and steel body parts, such as in the single “Worms”. But if it tastes good, then it tastes good, and WEEDKILLER is very delicate. Ashnikko’s self-insert as a cyborg fairy character on a vengeance campaign shoots everyone else on the record, but also himself in the leg: “Orange juice and toothpaste / I’ll roll around in blue paint / Thinking of new ways that I can self-sabotage. “
In all its creepy aesthetics, it’s also about inner abysses, about desire that shouldn’t be one, about queerness, auto-aggression. “I could get hurt / Bound with a curse / Don’t want this bubble to burst / […] I feel high when she look at me,” she admits on the track “Super Soaker,” which is just as uncomfortably relatable. WEEDKILLER might seem like it doesn’t quite know what it wants, but actually it does: The dystopian clusterfuck of a fairy gothic emo cyberpunk. Nice