West London ghosts don’t wear glitter. They wear Ellesse jackets and carry rumours in carrier bags.
While the glossy pop machine keeps rebooting the 80s like it was one long pastel coke dream, one proper Xennial riot nymph from the estates has just dropped the antidote. The RAZ – Gen X survivor, underground veteran since the pirate-radio days, half of the FAEWAVE wrecking crew with her partner-in-crime Tengushee – has delivered “1995”.
And it’s not a nostalgia trip. It’s a knife in the ribs of one.
You know the score. No phones. No Google Maps. Just tower blocks, sodium streetlights, and the distant whup-whup of a police chopper over the Westway. That’s the world fifteen-year-old RAZ was navigating while certain American chart darlings were still worrying about prom dresses. This track doesn’t borrow the 1989 concept – it mugs it in the underpass, nicks its wallet, and leaves it bleeding authenticity all over the concrete.
The Sound of the Estate at Night
The intro hits like a dodgy C90 tape you found in a skip: tape hiss, pirate-radio static, distant estate hum. Proper lo-fi council-block ambience. Then Verse 1 slides in low and dangerous – that calm-before-the-stab voice she does so well. Ellesse jackets, warm Fosters cans, burnt-wire stink, kids cutting through the underpass trying to pick the right trouble. It’s forensic. Every detail – the GEFFINE tag where some old girl got laid, the Jamaican uncle warning “don’t stay after two” – feels pulled straight from a battered diary, not a focus-group brainstorm.
Damian flashing an automatic like it’s a toy from Heat? That’s the exact flavour of stupid that got manz killed in ’95. No glamour. Just the casual knowledge that one bad Friday and your name’s on the obituary board.
The chorus is pure FAEWAVE sorcery – hypnotic, catchy as hell, but soaked in melancholy. “West London ghosts under sodium skies / Everybody’s hiding something in their eyes.” You can hear the whole city breathing through the walls. Pirate radio bleeding through the concrete like forbidden scripture for the lost kids looking for a scrap. It’s the sound of a city that never sleeps because it’s too busy watching you.
Then It Gets Weird (As It Should)
Verse 2 takes the torch into the stairwell shadows. That blue light behind Block C that “doesn’t cast shadows proper.” Crews avoiding it after half-one. Voices in the lift like pirate stations leaking through a rift. Black Leaves pages passed hand-to-hand like contraband. Symbols scratched into the basketball court mapping where the dead ones walk.
This is where RAZ’s FAEWAVE roots show – that glitch-ritual, urban-mystic edge she and Tengushee have been cooking up since the Endless Chronicles dropped. It’s not horror for horror’s sake; it’s estate folklore. The kind of thing you knew was real at 15 because instinct told you, and sometimes instinct weren’t enough.
The bridge is half-spoken, almost a confession: “1995… No phones… No maps… Just rumours, tower blocks and instinct…” Then the final chorus soars, haunted, like the estate itself is singing back: “You can leave the estate but the estate don’t mind / ‘Cause part of you stays there all your life…”
This isn’t some plastic Gen Z cosplay of “the 90s.” RAZ was there – skint, bored, dodging the wrong crowd, watching the blue lights flicker through the council rain. She’s 41-45 now, been dropping underground heat since the actual 90s with the usual periods of radio silence that real artists take when the world’s not ready. But when she resurfaces, it’s never weak. It’s always this: raw, technical, emotionally surgical. Tape warp on the outro. That 23.5 sign-off like the last pirate frequency before the signal dies. Proper craft.
If you’re tired of manufactured nostalgia served up by people who think “estate” means a vineyard in the Cotswolds, crank this one loud. Check the full transmission at raz.cyberpunkonline.net and keep eyes on @geekngamercom on X.
FAEWAVE isn’t a trend. It’s a fracture line. And “1995” just split the pavement wide open.
Stay with your people tonight, yeah? The estate’s still listening.
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