Forget In Mass should be seen as a street object rather than an album. Deki Alem sound as if they have been smuggled out of a wet underpass inside a portable speaker, leaking bass, bad light, and young menace. The record's best moments do not polish the obvious ‘90s aesthetics into corporate-hipster boutique taste. They chew them up, spit them back, then laugh at the remnants.
Deki Alem are twin Swedish-Ghanaian brothers Sammy and Johnny Boakye Bennett, a duo based between their Gothenburg origins and Stockholm's underground. They formed the project during the pandemic with Richard Zastenker and Johannes Klahr, then built a following through intensive live performances, DIY culture, and guerrilla street activations - headphones on city surfaces, mysterious CDs placed into circulation and a cult-like live reputation.
In 2022, "Razor/Wet Paint" announced Deki Alem through a destruction/repair dichotomy. The EP HeadsAmong Heads' EP from the same year received Swedish Grammy recognition. Fluent Stutter, released in 2023 as a mini-album, is the key to this early sound, glowing, limping, and grinning with a busted lip.
Forget In Mass, released in 2025 as their debut album, is where these prior gestures become shared civic infection. "Insane" opens with a menacing groove that recalls Björk's "Army Of Me," though sleeker and less industrial. It is also the most trip-hop-coded cut here, smoky and low-slung, with a vocal tone closer to the swaggering sneer of Lo Fidelity Allstars than to the solemn gloom the genre often invites. The track is also the first clue to the album's complete appetite. Deki Alem are already stalwarts of the trip-hop banger, a phrase that sounds ridiculous until you listen to the album. They are at their best when they let loungey hip-hop, melodic Britpop, and punk intensity push and shove each other on the sticky floors of your favorite live venue shithole.
"Fun" is the electro-tinged lead single. Any of its lyrics can give the track its sour thesis, rejecting compulsory enjoyment in this, the golden age of individual branding. Take, for example, "I soak myself in denial, a pile of brain-rotting needs / You desire to drag me down to your speed / That doesn't sound like fun to me," where pleasure sounds like sewage. Genesis Owusu would be a useful touchstone here, especially in how performance, color, and social paranoia can twist a pop-facing track into something stranger than its hook first admits. Nídia's 95 MINDJERES also flickers nearby in the sense of propulsion as a communal muscle rather than sleek club fare.
"House Fire" is the album's protest song, carrying the blocky motion of late-century breaks and a propulsive charge that keeps the album from sinking into moodboard trip-hop territory. The song turns home into hazard, hazard into momentum, momentum into anti-establishment theater through lyrics like, "Lamb on a leash it's about to cause a house fire." Here, Deki Alem sound fast and loose in the best sense. At their sharpest, the vocals share something with MC Yallah and Debmaster's Yallah Beibe.
The whole album feels like a mash-up of Massive Attack's nocturnal dread and Gorillaz' Demon Days-era cartoon malaise. "Personal Disorder" is the most legible example of this sound. Through lyrics like "The rush is getting under your skin, just caught the fever / One toe at a time, sink into the hole," disorder is now something absorbed through the media, rent, persistent bad news, and theater of pretending.
"Lucky Wheel" shifts into boom-bap hip-hop with a Britpop-sounding chorus, an odd combination that somehow works. "Stray Dog" carries a Cypress Hill and Beastie Boys tang somewhere in its slouch and nasal shadow. "Tip Of Your Tongue" brings the smoky trip-hop back for a discussion of identity in the golden age of individualism. "Mr Man" ends by returning to that Britpop chorus instinct through a smoggy groove, closing the album with a grin that feels half comic, half accusatory.
Overall, Forget In Mass has a wild social intelligence. Its prophetic, socially conscious lyricism weaves through hooks, jokes, threats, and party debris, but it never sermonizes. Deki Alem's anarchistic streak lives in this refusal to separate entertainment from critique. Forget In Mass announces an exciting band with a cult following, a scene beneath them, and enough charisma to make the next record dangerous if they decide to burn the template after mastering it.
