maehem99 announces debut EP ‘Sexual Commerce’ out June

maehem99 leads you by the hand into the club, plunged into an anonymous dark blinkered by piercing strobe light. Their voice gleams like all beautiful things, an almost saintly devotion to reaching pop’s highest ideal – but the beats are fallen and filthy; hedonistic floor-fillers to cloud the mind and make the blood rush in the vein of FKA Twigs and Arca. Equal parts dream and nightmare, the Irish-South African artist’s first single ‘I Can’t Be Your Guy’ announces a new vision which is as urgent as it is startlingly complete.

Alongside the new single, maehem99 announces their debut EP Sexual Commerce. The five-track project is an intensely human document drawn from alienating experience. Its five tracks untangle maehem99’s career as a fashion model and the insidious spiral into the nightlife industry; the art of the image, the rot it conceals and the identity it redefines.

‘I Can’t Be Your Guy’ is a euphoric club cut with urgent synths, lending an underlying sense of horror as they disappear into the party: “I throw our cash in the air / You shake out your long hair / Feel like I’m falling in line / I can’t catch you and I’m here / We move faster, faster, faster…”

The visual world for lead single ‘I Can’t Be Your Guy’ was conjured to life in the very same VIP club where Mae once danced. The cold glint of the pole and the skin-sag of a brown leather sofa; sunken eyes and their bound chest, legs parted like a man with a t-shirt cheekily proclaiming “I LOVE MY WIFE”. This tension between knowing humour and visceral detail can be felt again in the EP’s artwork: in their former sugar daddy’s home they set fire to his expensive shirt, staring down the barrel of the camera lens with unflinching detachment.

Marking their first release as an artist in command of their own vision, from here onwards the only fantasy maehem99 embodies is their own.