Emily Allan — Clanging

I thought I had an idea what I was in for, but Emily Allan‘s debut is one of the most challenging albums I’ve ever heard, and not in the pretentious sense. Allan is a Manhattan-based rapper, writer, performer, and director, and she brings elements of all of these to bear on Clanging. It’s funny, shocking, provocative and unsettling. In hindsight, I should have expected this level of provocation from an artist whose instagram handle is a reference to one of the most troubled and reviled artists of the past 50 years. I looked forward to this record since “Perfect Brain” found me last December, and even still it was almost too much to process.

“Perfect Brain” was my introduction to Allan’s music, and it’s an excellent place to start. It introduces the condition after which the album is named. Related to schizophrenia, clanging is described in the introduction as “a mode of speech characterized by words based on sound rather than concept…symptomatic of an extreme state of psychosis.”

The song itself, and its paranoid, gonzo music video, brings the idea to alarming life. Allan claims she’d “never go manic on main”, then does exactly that: spiraling from claiming to be MKUltra and being “at every disaster in lower manhattan / the one crisis actor recording it all“, to fully nonsensical syllables (“Rin tin tin chip chop chitty bang bang“) like someone dealing with an uncontrollable tic.

It’s riveting and upsetting, an unpredictable and wildly uncomfortable listen. In an interview with Document Journal, she describes the record’s origin:

I had a good friend who had a very explosive, manic episode and ended up in the psych ward, and then later showed me her hospital report. There was all this documentation of her when she was really high on her own supply, and all these details—she kept running around the locked ward, chanting over and over, ‘I’m young, dumb, and full of cum,’ and she was obsessively listening to Mos Def’s ‘Mathematics,’ and getting obsessed with rhyme.

The lyrics throughout Clanging are compulsive and splintered, full of repetition, contradiction, and intrusive thoughts. On “Driving,” she loops monosyllables (“God”, “sex”, “next”) in increasingly meaningless ways. On “W.I.F.E” she spirals into explicit fantasies that sounds like it comes from an unhinged person on the bus (“I might fuck everybody to death just to get them to shut the fuck up“). “Everybody Game” plays like a twisted version of “Cha Cha Slide,” with a series of dissociative dance commands like “slap the floor / beat the whore” and “clap once if you ever want to die.”

If it sounds like a bit, it’s not. This isn’t a novelty record. Clanging has a clear and unsettling point of view. It’s about obsession, distortion, and compulsive thought spirals. It’s a portrait of an overstimulated, overwhelmed mind with a malfunctioning filter. Allan’s delivery seems detached, but it’s deliberately unbalanced, channeling someone in a moment of severe distress. There’s all kinds of explicit sex talk on this record, but it’s not sexy – it’s closer to symptom than seduction.

The final track, “Steps of Destruction,” drops the rhyme entirely. It’s a spoken monologue that’s cold, surgical, and devastating. It outlines a slow-motion campaign of psychological sabotage in a voice so calm it feels like a confession or a curse. It works like a reveal, reframing everything that came before it. After a full listen and a read of the liner notes on Bandcamp, the record hits completely different.

Clanging is not just about being unwell. The shadow of 9/11 looms large here. The production on this record (largely the work of E.J. O’Hara) lands somewhere between the glory days of DFA Records and Sexyback-era Timbaland. Emily Allan was 9 years old and has clear memories of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, and it’s easy to imagine the psychological toll that comes with it.

For all its absurdity, Clanging is razor-sharp. Emily Allan isn’t trying to make sense of the condition, she’s documenting how it feels when things go off the rails. Once you get to the concept of the record, through the provocation and shocking vulgarity, it’s one of the most memorable and complicated records of the year.