Bassvictim

A Berlin introduction that went badly

Bassvictim is the product of a meeting neither party enjoyed. Maria Manow, a Polish-English singer-songwriter born in Bydgoszcz on 2 December 1998, and Ike Clateman, an American-English producer, were both students at Goldsmiths, University of London when they were introduced on a trip to Berlin in the summer of 2022. They took against each other immediately, and said so plainly when NME asked about it years later. Months afterwards they collided again outside Peckham Audio, a small club in south London, worked out they were at the same university, and went off and made "Air On A G String" that same night. The doorway where the second meeting happened supplied the name.

The two brought unequal amounts of nightlife to the partnership. Manow had found her footing in Berlin's club scene, including long stretches at Berghain. Clateman, by his own account, had barely been to a party before she took him to one. What he was after was a voice rather than a scene. "I was searching for a personality that was really raw and really human," he told NME in December 2025. "As soon as I met Maria, I was like: she's the one."

Victim of the Bass, then the tapes

The duo's first audience was one they assembled themselves. From around 2023 they ran club nights under the banner Victim of the Bass, initially as a way of playing their own tracks to friends, and the nights outgrew that purpose quickly enough to pull in strangers.

Basspunk arrived on 22 April 2024 through KMIF: nine tracks, handled by the pair as a mixtape rather than a formal debut. Basspunk 2 followed on 30 January 2025, this time on VOTB, the label they have released through since. Their singles between 2023 and 2026 brought in collaborators from well outside the electroclash lane, among them Oatmilkandcodeine, bod [包家巷] and Worldpeace DMT. In February 2025 NME put them on its annual 100 list of emerging artists.

Forever and the reception

The debut album, Forever, came out on 10 October 2025 on VOTB. Pitchfork rated it 7.5 and described the production as thickset yet deceptively simple; the same publication placed it 49th on its list of the 50 best albums of 2025.

The record's method is collision. Piano samples and other wistful fragments sit against basslines weighted for a club system, with Manow's vocals left unsanded on top. Writing on 10 December 2025, NME credited Bassvictim with an electroclash revival running alongside Snow Strippers and The Hellp. By the time that interview ran the duo had already sold out EartH Hall in Hackney.

A question mark where the bass used to be

"Year of the Dragon", made with Worldpeace DMT, appeared in the first week of March 2026 and looked like the start of an ordinary single campaign. Two days later, on 6 March, the pair released an eight-track EP titled ? with no notice.

Chris DeVille, writing in Stereogum on 10 March 2026, read the EP as a deliberate reversal: ballad-heavy, assembled from "acoustic strums, gorgeous clouds of harmony, and ample empty space" rather than dance-pop, a trajectory he likened to Animal Collective working backwards from Merriweather Post Pavilion to Sung Tongs. He called the result phenomenal.

A review in New University on 23 March 2026 took the softening less happily, arguing that ? surrenders the attitude, energy and vulgarity of the earlier work while leaning harder into the nostalgia that had already surfaced on Forever. The heavy low end survives; the vocals and instrumentation around it are gentler.

Standing in October 2026

The festival year put them in front of larger crowds than the club nights ever could. They played the Pier 80 ship tent at Portola in San Francisco on 26 September 2026, and appeared earlier in the year at Primavera a la Ciutat, the Barcelona city programme that runs parallel to Primavera Sound.

The current run is billed as the White Flag Tour. It reached the Showbox SoDo in Seattle on 30 September 2026, ReelWorks in Denver on 6 October and the Fox Theatre in Boulder on 7 October, then worked through Texas — Dallas on 9 October, Austin on 10 October, San Antonio on 12 October and White Oak Music Hall in Houston on 13 October. III Points in Miami follows on 16 and 17 October, then Atlanta on 19 October, two nights at Cermak Hall in Chicago on 22 and 23 October, Columbus on 24 October, Boston on 26 October, Philadelphia on 27 October, The National in Richmond on 29 October, Washington on 30 October and New York on Hallowe'en. Europe takes over in November: Paris on 4 November, London on 6 November and Dublin on 15 November. Thoom opens the North American dates, the Lebanese producer's first tour of the United States.

Not all of the attention has been musical. Social-media discourse about alleged physical altercations between the two shadowed the Forever campaign. Both have described the incidents as situational rather than abusive; Manow told NME she started the first fight and that casting her as a victim was "borderline sexist", while Clateman's summary was that best friends make mistakes and move on from them.

What happens on stage

The staging is sparse by design. Clateman works from the back of the stage with his DJ equipment set on the floor, often crouched over it for most of the set, while Manow holds the front without a mic stand and uses the whole width of the stage. Screens, fog and hard colour do the rest: at Webster Hall in Manhattan on 7 March 2026 the backdrop was filled with horses, lit by what the reviewer called circus-coloured lights.

Set lengths through the autumn have run between about 65 and 100 minutes, with 13 songs the standard count — 9.10pm to 10.15pm in Seattle on 30 September, 9.30pm to 11.10pm in Denver on 6 October, 10.05pm to 11.40pm in Boulder the following night. Recent sets have opened with "It's me Maria" and moved early into "Wooden girl" and "Alice", with "white flag", "Forever salty", "Grass is Greener" and "Wolves Howling" among the regulars.

The late-night club bookings produce a different show again. At Webster Hall the doors opened at 11pm and the duo did not start until 1.15am, to a sold-out room with a queue round the block. That set opened with "Sometimes I believe in God", built through "Grow Up!!!" and "27a Pitfield St" with the crowd returning the words, and was announced as finished after "Air on a G String" before an encore closed on "Home!!! (wake up)". Leo Schechter, reviewing for Fordham's Relish, described a perspiring, ketamine-fuelled crowd moving as a single unit and concluded that between the music and their ethos Bassvictim can captivate a room. A separate review of a sold-out show at the Outset outside Chicago, where Worldpeace DMT turned up as a surprise opener, made the opposite point about atmosphere: Mimi Mikhailov reported one of the kindest crowds she had been in, nobody pushing for space, the whole thing closer to a karaoke dance party than a recital.