Blackhaine has released ‘Northside Needs Me’, the second song to be unveiled from his forthcoming debut album Saints In The Wethouse – out 13th November via XL Recordings.
Produced by Wraith9, ‘Northside Needs Me’ centres on Blackhaine’s tangled feelings about his identity as a northern artist. “Northside needs me, I’m the drug they abuse,” he barks. On one level, the song is an ego trip about being uplifted in the much-discussed north west England experimental scene, and his perceived imitators. “I was like ‘everyone’s dancing now, everybody’s making harsh noise music, and everyone wants to be from up north’,” he says. “I don’t feel like that at all anymore, but at the time I was like ‘everyone’s copying me.’” On another, it’s about being tied to an aesthetic idea of this scene’s music (noirish atmospheres, club-adjacent sounds, confessional lyrics), when his work’s really about a methodology: “formless art.” Scattershot references to violence ground it all in real issues around his community, through “the madness that’s been going on over the last 15 years” since the 2011 riots in his former home of Salford.
LISTEN TO / WATCH “NORTHSIDE NEEDS ME” HERE
Blackhaine’s debut LP Saints In The Wethouse is a visceral embodiment of his game-changing, auteur rap noise sound and status: a 12-track gut punch of drunken confession and brawling swagger; hardcore songs about a deserted man seeking salvation through exhaustion. Six years since Blackhaine’s story began in a Blackpool hotel room (resulting in 2020’s Armour EP on classmate Rainy Miller’s Fixed Abode label), the north west England iconoclast comes into his own on Saints In The Wethouse as not just a raving rap force of nature, but also a songwriter of noise rock discipline and bleeding heart industrial folk ballads.
A ruthless tension and release plays out the LP’s narrative-aesthetic arc, from negative ecstasy to exhaustive catharsis. Mainly realised in studio by Blackhaine, and reinforced by executive producer Wraith9 (EsDeeKid, Fakemink), it features a tight-knit crew of North West day-ones — Rainy Miller, Croww, Space Afrika — with additional chops by Ship Sket, Vanessa Bedoret, and Gabe Evans giving cadence and grain to its unflinching hyperrealist-fiction.
Aligned to Blackhaine’s vision and dramaturgy, the cast realise an album worthy of his cinematic namesake. His live shows and art-world exhibitions carry that same uniquely intense stage presence and clarity of vision — sought for stage and creative direction by the likes of Playboi Carti, and presented at institutions including the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Sonar, Manchester International Festival, the Venice Biennale and Club2Club. That same intensity transposes directly to record, galvanising the distorted hoover fanfare of opener ‘Cold Shoulder’ to bruxist degrees, and ratcheting the power electronics surge of ‘Northside Needs Me’.
But, for all its future-bracing bravado, the album endures when Blackhaine flexes his emotional range and comes to terms with more timeless truths. Matured songwriting disarmingly bleeds to the fore in naked ballad ‘The Wind’, channelling Vini Reilly via a Rainy Miller duet, while first single ‘Consumer’ channels Philip Best vitriol and salutes Mad Cobra via an iconic sample drop.
And it all comes to the surface on the 8-minute crash out that names ‘Saints In The Wethouse’, a northern neo-gothic tableaux of one final, scorched-earth blowout. No fence-sitting: Saints In The Wethouse will be fêted & hated — always the sign of a vital, original work which defies perceptions and tramples boundaries with proper conviction in its thing.
Blackhaine
Saints In The Wethouse
13th November 2026
XL Recordings
Tracklisting
- Cold Shoulder
- Northside Needs Me
- Hostel / Valium
- 5 Days
- Consumer
- Born From Wound [Floodlights]
- The Wind
- Pyrex
- Never Alone
- Artwork
- Spirit
- Saints In The Wethouse
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