aya came up adjacent to the deconstructed club boom of the early 2020s. Her murky, feverish breakout tracks, for labels including Wisdom Teeth and Tri Angle, traded hands like poorly kept secrets. Yet her music has always felt more like a tool for dissociation than a gesture to motion. Sure, many of the releases on YCO — the label she co-runs with kindred experimental dance favorite BFTT — favor pounding dubstep. But aya’s solo album material is more formless, calling to mind aural sludge dripping from warehouse rafters. On her celebrated 2021 full-length debut, im hole, hyperpop, ambient, and grime were melted into a radioactive muck that thrummed with inexplicable spontaneity.
