Fire has always been part of KAVARI’s language. Long before her debut for XL Recordings, the Glasgow-based producer was extracting rhythm from rupture, once building an entire EP around the crackle of flame on 2025’s Only Pleasure in Flame. That instinct remains intact on PLAGUE MUSIC, a four-track blast of scorched club futurism that refines a decade of sonic extremity into something lean, violent and strangely precise.
Emerging in the early 2020s through cavernous bootlegs and the cult-favorite Lost Cuts edit packs on Bandcamp, KAVARI has become a producer shrouded in grit and late night mythology. Her edits dismantled pop and EDM ephemera in the lineage of GHE20G0TH1K and Fade to Mind, reassembling them into deconstructed club weapons. By 2023 she had crossed into broader consciousness when Aphex Twin reportedly championed her bulldozing ‘Attachment Style (VIP)’, cementing her reputation as a sound designer with arena-level impact and basement credibility.
Across its four tracks, PLAGUE MUSIC sees KAVARI reshaping maximalist chaos into something colder and more architectural. The sub-bass on ‘PULSE’ grinds beneath layers of hard-clipped distortion and industrial glitches, each frequency sanded down until it buzzes with claustrophobic tension. ‘IRON VEINS’ snaps with double-fried crispness, its breakbeats stretched and battered but never quite collapsing into pure noise. Even at its most punishing, the EP is meticulously controlled.
What separates KAVARI from the legion of distortion merchants is her restraint. She understands negative space. The murmur threading through the incendiary ‘SERPENT CHAMBER’ replaces the expected hype command with something more unnerving: intimacy, contrasted against titanic horror. On ‘SCYTHE’, coughing field recordings, eerie stabs, and distant kicks conjure plague-era paranoia.
With this apocalyptic outing, KAVARI tames the chaos that defined her early years – but it is still there, straining at the leash – creating an uncannily cathartic soundtrack to reaching for the darkest corners of one’s psyche on the dance floor. Death may stalk the edges of her mixes, but so does rebirth.
