Canty - Mirrorball (Official Video)
Photo Credit: Lara Laeverenz
East London multi-disciplinarian Canty announces their new mixtape Dim Binge. The 10-track mixtape will be released January 31st, 2025, on Full Time Hobby.
Lead single “Mirrorball” is a striking entrance point – a work of revelation that faces up to a huge personal challenge. “About a year ago my legs went numb,” Canty recalls. “Then I ended up going to hospital for a little while… and I was diagnosed with MS.” The song’s lyrics even reference this diagnosis, with the words “cables in my spine” becoming a loose echo of a doctor’s prognosis. The song goes beyond that, though - laced with information and detail, it’s a reference to the overwhelming internal landscape verging on euphoria, whether that’s anxiety, sensory overload, or the legacy of trauma.
Canty blends the old with the new, the sacred with the profane, the tender with the explicit, their output both as a songwriter and visual artist occupies its own lane. Moving and distinctive, their incoming mixtape Dim Binge is their truest testimony yet, a work of scorched autobiography that feels utterly distinctive.
The songs on Dim Binge have deep roots. The record reaches back to Canty’s earliest memories, before tackling their most recent dilemmas. A project prompted by what they term as “a few before-and-after moments” it looks beyond these crises to supply something universal. “Songwriting is something that just makes sense to me,” Canty says. “I love how melodies and words intersect. It’s sacred to me.”
Working from a mate’s flat Canty started “spewing ideas out” in an epic fit of creativity, matching musical exhalation to hours spent carving, scratching, and scribbling portraits on old pieces of cardboard. Canty began patching these together, a collage-like approach creating something multi-faceted, complex, but wholly striking. As Canty puts it, the sessions were “a binge cocktail of self-care, psilocybin and self-recording.”
The mixtape is matched to a book of drawings from this multi-faceted artist, and it’s given unity by elements of their live performances, with Canty helming pop-up events at underground venues across East London. Someone who relishes connection, Canty is making a huge impression. Playing key sets at The Great Escape and Simple Things Festival, their early work was beloved by 6Music and KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic. Working with pivotal imprint Full Time Hobby, Dim Binge is both an exhalation, and a clearing of the decks. “This mixtape has been a learning process – what works for me, what I like. A way to make sure that music isn’t the problem, it’s the solution”.