Album Review: Beside Myself by DJ Haram
DJ Haram joins the instrumentation, proof that for all her curatorial skill, her story can no longer be told strictly in samples, then invites an insurgent guest list to ignite the mix.
DJ Haram—born Zubeyda Muzeyyen—grew up in Passaic County, New Jersey, absorbing the darbuka-heavy pop her family played at home while sneaking out to Jersey-club parties and noisy basement shows across the Delaware River in Philadelphia. That cross-state shuffle hardened her taste for unruly percussion and sharpened a political edge. By the time she moved to Philly’s DIY noise circuit, she was splitting evenings between radical-organizing meetings and improvised sets that flipped shaabi riffs into clattering break-beats. Her DJ practice, she says, was “freestyling adult life,” a self-education that took her from house parties to bills stretching from Detroit warehouses to Dubai festivals in barely a decade. She further situates herself as a bridge between Jersey’s club legacy and global avant-garde club currents. Interviews trace those roots to a scene where she learned to “desync the role of the DJ from hedonism advocate,” treating the booth as a site of dissent as much as dance.
That tension powers Grace, her 2019 Hyperdub debut EP. Written in the aftermath of a family tragedy, the record treats each track as a jinn, spirits both protective and malevolent, threading ghostly synth arpeggios through rattling Middle Eastern hand-drum loops and clipped Jersey snares. Partnerships soon multiplied. With Philly poet-agitator Moor Mother, she had already seeded 700 Bliss; their 2022 album, Nothing to Declare, vaulted noise rap into a screaming head-rush of blast beats, siren synths, and capitalist indictment. The duo’s chemistry—Ayewa’s shape-shifting vocal fury over Haram’s strobing drums—proved elastic enough for festival stages and museum residencies, expanding Haram’s reach beyond the club circuit. Simultaneously, she channeled that energy into rap’s left flank, becoming a go-to producer for Backwoodz Studioz affiliates and other iconoclasts.
Her growing résumé reads like a map of contemporary underground hip-hop. On Armand Hammer’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips (2023), she co-produced the smoldering opener “Supermooned,” drenching billy woods and ELUCID in queasy synth fog, then spiked the single “Trauma Mic” with collapsing drums and molten bass, Pink Siifu snarling at the center of the blast radius. MCs praise her meticulousness—woods calls her beats “massaged like dough,” sculpted until every abrasive edge gleams. Those same instincts drove “Fishnets,” a 2025 single pairing Bbymutha and Sha Ray over co-production with August Fanon, its violin scrapes and boom-bap thump foreshadowing the album to come, pairing up with “Voyeur,” an instrumental single that paired industrial clang with a stuttering club kick last April, followed by the more lyric-centered “Distress Tolerance,” where Haram’s own vocal spat “fuck these allies” against the synth swells (more on that later). This reinforced that the forthcoming LP would not seek cohesion in comfort.
Beside Myself delivers on that promise. In “Stenography,” DJ Haram crafts a shifting sonic landscape that mirrors the track’s preoccupation with code, decay, and reassembly. ELUCID intones “Yakub blew up the moon,” immediately setting an apocalyptic tone that speaks to both mythic rupture and fractured histories. billy woods comes through with a contrast between mirage and reality, a recurring motif of promise versus betrayal. As he recounts “Burning plastic in burn pits, the fumes writhing,” the smog of empire trades on spectacle even as it stains the air; that image is wielded like evidence. Later, he invokes Winston Smith—“I tried to live inside/But you already know how it go with the pigs”—and lays bare the brutality of surveillance and coercion. “IDGAF” fuses sludgy guitar from Abdul Hakim Bilal with rattling darbuka, the meter flipping mid-bar and resetting the floor beneath the listener, “Lifelike” stacks Moor Mother’s clipped poetry over off-grid taiko hits; the groove lurches but never slips, a testament to precise sequencing, and “Sahel” has El Kontessa firing rapid-cadence Arabic verses while Haram pitch-bends hi-hats into snarls, refusing any ornamental treatment of regional sounds.
DJ Haram stages a confrontation with vulnerability that feels urgent and unvarnished on “Distress Tolerance.” “They only love me when I beg for forgiveness,” the track reveals, highlighting the cycles of dependence and anger, and underlining how the personal is bound up with wider social pressures, while also emphasizing the rawness of her appeal for chaos. Haram offers a study in how structural restraint can heighten emotional turbulence, pairing candid storytelling with a production palette that feels as fractious as the internal arguments it conveys. The album maintains her percussion-heavy fusion, incorporating Jersey-club swing, SWANA hand drums, and clipped noise textures, but allows harsher guitar, puckered mizmār, and brief vocal passages to cut through the surface. The political weight of this album, though, doesn’t just come from singles or verses—it comes from context. Haram waited two years to finalize the album during the regional conflict. She reflected that in an interview: “I didn’t know how to put work out” amid war and political tension. Instead of silence, she let the record render that indecision.
What distinguishes the record is its attention to clarity. Haram pans percussion aggressively (“Do U Love Me” and “Deep Breath (An Ending)”), carving frequencies so that each collaborator sits in a stable pocket (“Remaining”), and cuts arrangements before repetition sets in (“Badass”), about the choices that owe as much to her years in noise lofts as to club residencies. The mood remains tense, but the engineering prioritizes intelligibility, highlighting lyrics about abandonment, solidarity, and resource scarcity without resorting to abstraction. From Passaic bedrooms to Philadelphia warehouses, from Grace’s sparse militancy to Handplay’s short-form confrontations, Beside Myself extends that ethic to album length without diluting its bite, confirming her as a producer who can scale intensity while maintaining focus. Where earlier releases hinted at the possibility, this one documents execution. The arc is clear: study communities, build tools, challenge form, and, when the vocabulary feels sufficient, speak in full sentences. Her debut album neither masks its anger nor sacrifices precision, situating DJ Haram at the front of a scene that asks club rhythms to carry more than movement.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Fishnets,” “Stenography,” “Distress Tolerance”