Northern Dial Artist Profile

Backxwash

Montréal, Québec, Canada

Zambian-Canadian rapper and producer Ashanti Mutinta, known as Backxwash, built her career in Montréal by pushing hip-hop into much harsher territory than conventional rap production usually allows. After earlier independent releases, her 2020 album God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It fused distorted guitars, industrial noise, doom-metal weight and confrontational rap with writing about faith, identity and survival. The record won the 2020 Polaris Music Prize, bringing a fiercely experimental, independently released album to one of Canada's most visible music institutions.

That breakthrough became the first part of a trilogy. I Lie Here Buried with My Rings and My Dresses followed in 2021, and His Happiness Shall Come First Even Though We Are Suffering arrived in 2022, extending the project's intense mixture of horror imagery, spirituality, trauma and self-interrogation. Backxwash's production treats abrasion as an expressive tool rather than decoration: guitars, blown-out drums, samples and dense vocal layers create a sound that can move between rap, industrial music and metal without settling comfortably inside any one scene.

The 2025 album Only Dust Remains opened a new phase after that trilogy, broadening the sonic palette while keeping the emotional directness that defined the earlier work. Backxwash matters in Canadian music because her Polaris win demonstrated that uncompromising experimental rap could occupy the centre of national critical conversation without softening its sound or subject matter. Her catalogue has helped make Montréal's underground hip-hop landscape feel connected to metal, noise and electronic music as much as to rap orthodoxy.