Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals, Live From The Apocalypse

After the five years producer Infinity Knives and rapper Brian Ennals have had, you’d think they’d be on top of the world. The Baltimore duo spent the early part of the decade crafting two critically acclaimed albums—2020’s Rhino XXL and 2022’s King Cobra—in which disco grooves and electropunk freakouts clashed with blunt rhymes shorn of entendre or wordplay. They’ve since earned big co-signs from indie-rap heavyweights like Blockhead and Shrapknel, toured Europe twice, and opened for the Irish rap trio Kneecap last year. But now, on the verge of releasing their grimly beautiful third album, A City Drowned In God’s Black Tears, out April 4, their excitement is grinding up against frustration.

I link with Ennals and Knives—the latter was born Tariq Ravelomanana and spent his childhood in Madagascar and South Africa—at a bar in Manhattan’s Penn Station on an oddly balmy February afternoon. They’re fresh off the Amtrak from Baltimore and have another meeting ahead of them. All three of us are dressed too warmly and caught off guard by the springtime sun gleaming off the sides of Madison Square Garden as we make our way to a nearby diner to talk. As we sit down, I tell them how exciting it is to see them at what appears to be the brink of a breakthrough. “That’s what everyone keeps telling me,” Knives says with a sigh, chuckling and pausing a beat. “But I came here with $58 in my pocket today.” 

Blistering honesty like that is at the core of the Knives and Ennals experience. They’re known for Ennals’ shockingly direct lyrics, which read more like unfiltered thoughts on everything from racism and overcoming mental illness to rape culture and politics. It also helps that Ennals is one of just a handful of modern rappers willing to take a public stand against Israel’s war on Gaza and Palestinians without a shred of cowardice. “Zionists are the new Nazis/Netanyahu is the new Hitler/Bodies keep piling the fuck up/America and Israel just get richer,” he screams over Knives’ frenetic synths and 808s, just 24 seconds into the album’s opening track, “The Iron Wall.” And if you think that’s bold, the closest thing to a hook here is Ennals unblinkingly reading the nation’s last three presidents for filth: “Donald Trump/You a rapist and you know it/Joe Biden/You a Nazi and you know it/Obama/You’s a devil and you know it.”

The night before we met up, the popular left-wing YouTuber F.D. Signifier shared “The Iron Wall” with his nearly one million subscribers, saying, “While we’re on the topic of what revolutionary music might sound like…” Ennals initially found out after his 5-year-old son’s mother, who’s a big fan of F.D. Signifier, sent him the post in disbelief—Ennals didn’t even know who he was beforehand. While the duo appreciate the support, they bristle at the notion of being put in a box. 

“I’m not a revolutionary. That’s a hard load to carry, bro,” Ennals says with a laugh. “I’m not starting breakfast programs, you know what I’m sayin’? It’s a lot of responsibility. I don’t write like, Oh, did I say something about how much I hate the cops on this? Or something about, like, oppression? I can’t write like that. It’s not fully who we are, but it’ll always be an aspect because we’re aware. I don’t like the word ‘conscious,’ but we’re aware of our surroundings.” 

“I’m a high school dropout,” Knives adds. “I am not, in any way, shape, or form, an academic. I tried reading [Karl Marx’s] Das Kapital and thought it was boring as shit. I’m a dumb dude, and even I know this shit ain’t right.” For them, being real extends beyond the geopolitical state of the world. Reality is conflicting music taste—Knives thought Kanye West was a “hack” from day one (“Keep this on the record,” he insists), while the disgraced superstar was, until recently, one of Ennals’ favorite artists—working dead-end jobs, and finding whatever comfort you can to get by.

Ennals and his girlfriend at the time moved to New Jersey in 2013, where he worked for a while at a yearbook factory and spent just as much time high on the couch. He had recently connected with Knives after the latter read a review of Ennals’ solo album Candy Cigarettes in a local paper and hit him up on Twitter. Knives, already a multi-instrumentalist but easing himself into producing, started making beats and sending them to Ennals. After Ennals moved back to Baltimore in 2019, they began working together in earnest, starting with a handful of verses on Knives’ 2020 album Dear, Sudan. They immediately saw each other as kindred musical spirits, both daring and boisterous and plainspokenly tired of dealing with what life had been throwing at them.     

Rhino XXL, a collection of 1980s-style rap synth jams and futuristic psychedelia, brought them modest success and an invitation to play some shows in Europe in March of 2022. Not all the shows turned out well—both remember a day in the small English city of Birkenhead, where only three people showed up at a 300-cap venue—but it gave them room to test out early forms of songs that would wind up on King Cobra. By the time it dropped that July, they had enough motion to ensure their subsequent tours were much livelier. “The love is there,” Ennals says of their shows over the past couple of years, where new fans would greet them at the merch table and old fans would fly in from out of state. “It introduced me to a new standard of what it means to be an artist,” Knives adds. 

But as lit as those gigs were, the duo weren’t earning enough money to quit their day jobs, and the post-tour comedown was harsh. “Part of it was seeing how well King Cobra had done critically, and how nothing came of it,” Knives says. Cobra, was released via the UK indie label Phantom Limb, which will also release God’s Black Tears. According to Knives, they’ve met with other labels, who are usually surprised they’re not already signed somewhere bigger. Sometime after the touring for King Cobra had wrapped up, Ennals stopped seeing his therapist and taking his meds and spent every day at his medical center recruitment job hammered out of his mind. Work on God’s Black Tears had already begun before they left for the Kneecap tour—many of the album’s beats were leftovers from the King Cobra sessions, and Knives either produced the rest himself or called in session musicians to play his compositions. But between the drugs and the extended post-tour depression, getting Ennals into the studio was difficult. “This album was a darker journey,” Ennals says. 

That darkness is balanced out by the often gleaming synths and 808s from Knives, who stitches epic instrumental compositions in between the rap tracks (“They’re not interludes!” Knives is quick to tell me). “Live at the Chinese Buffet” chases a call-and-response hook fit for a Run-D.M.C. song, as Ennals spins a story about meeting the devil while coked out on his couch watching Platoon. Lead single “Sometimes, Papi Chulo,” a revamp of a song from Candy Cigarettes, plays like an unfiltered venting session about coming home broke from tour, finding Jesus while on crack, and suicidal ideation. It’s a roller-coaster of a track, especially thanks to Knives’ stab at a cumbia beat that he put together “while listening to a lot of Selena.” These are two of the rawest moments on an album teeming with rawness, not so much a desperate plea as it is the second-wind push to the finish line. 

Knives’ sound is candy-colored and eclectic, pulling influences from Latin music, first-wave hip-hop, even System of a Down. (Notice the interpolation of SOAD’s “Tentative” on the bridge for “The Iron Wall”: “Where do you expect us to go when the bombs fall?”) A big part of God’s Black Tears’ expansive, frenetic aesthetic was shepherded by musician and album co-producer Frankie “Franki3” Malaviaz, whose studio, custom plugins, and Eurorack modules proved a boon for both Knives and Ennals when they needed to get out of their own heads. “She would corral us,” Knives said of Franki3’s work. “It’s nice to work with somebody, because you teach them something, they teach you something, and then the feedback loops in.” Ideas came constantly, which is a good thing, considering some of the sound files they were using were lost or corrupted in the process of recording and had to be painstakingly recreated from scratch. Nothing about the way God’s Black Tears came together was easy, which shows in the urgency and sprawl of its songs. 

And yet I can’t help but find the album liberating. There’s power and catharsis in naming your demons. For all the blood and sweat that went into its creation, God’s Black Tears puts love on full display. It tackles calamities and setbacks both personal and grand; from the constant newsfeed of atrocities in Gaza to the Trump administration’s dismantling of marginalized Americans’ rights to eviction notices, mass layoffs, and life-altering illnesses.

After we finish eating, I escort Ennals and Knives to the edge of Manhattan to meet with a prospective new label. It’s hard not to admire these two men, whose bank accounts don’t match their accolades or talent, but who are pushing through anyway. They’re not charity cases or making music fit for grocery store shopping—I can’t imagine a world where Target would stock an album like God’s Black Tears, and that feels like a big part of the appeal. Their music is beautifully abrasive, as euphoric as the moment before your body registers you’ve stubbed a toe or scraped your knee. Raw and urgent honesty like that couldn’t be better suited for a world processing a new form of pain every day.