REVIEW: NOWHERE2RUN - BLOODRAVE

NOWHERE2RUN’s surprise release, BLOODRAVE, feels like an invitation down a staircase most people don’t notice until the bass leaking through the concrete gives it away. JAMI MORGAN and ERIC “SHADE” BALDEROSE have built something that sits several floors beneath the neon polish of mainstream techno music. The EP conjures the atmosphere of a sleazy, sweaty, underground industrial club, the kind where the air tastes metallic and the lights never settle long enough for you to get comfortable. It doesn’t just present that world though: it lives in it.

Both musicians have long histories with density and distortion. Their work in CODE ORANGE pushed heavy music into hyper-modern shapes, and that same instinct for total sensory control carries over here, only rerouted through different wiring. NOWHERE2RUN pulls from industrial, techno, soundtrack design, and club culture, translating those influences with the precision of two artists who understand physicality in sound. Listening to this EP makes you acutely aware exactly how sonic pressure can affect the listener, and how noise can tell its own kind of story.

Opening track Dance Till You Bleed, featuring rising UK electronic artist NIMDA, pulls you into that current with a pulse that feels ritualistic rather than decorative. Warning follows with a mantra that circles back on itself: “warning” / “it’s not just a signal, it’s a warning”. The phrasing is blunt, but the delivery lands like a distressed transmission. Paranoia twists that tension tighter, building into something perfectly fitting of its name, while the title track, Bloodrave, opens with a bright, hypnotic melody that slowly warps as its layers accumulate - a sound that starts almost innocent and ends unrecognisable, as if bent out of shape by the environment around it.

Machine is the moment where the EP exposes its moving parts. Midway through, the track seems to seize with beats skipping, momentum sagging, everything juddering as though a system error has erupted inside the mix. It’s an interruption that feels fittingly mechanical rather than human, and when the track snaps back into motion it feels like something has been forced back online. That single fracture adds a sense of instability that lingers through the entire EP.  Alt-pop star SIIICKBRAIN’s appearance on Floodlightz fits the record’s colder edge without softening it. Her voice arrives like a whisper caught between strobes: quiet, eerie, almost drifting out of phase with the instrumentation. She threads through the mix like someone leaning close in a room full of noise, as if she’s haunting the chaos around you. 

The Exit brings the experience to a close with a steadier rhythm that feels deliberate after the EP’s earlier volatility. The name is literal in a way that isn’t cliche. It’s the sound of stepping away from the sensory overload, weaving through the final corridor of a club where the walls are still vibrating from everything that came before. After all the rhythmic churn and distortion of the previous six tracks, there’s something fitting about ending on a piece that feels like you’ve finally located the door and are pushing it open into cooler air.

By the end, BLOODRAVE feels less like a collection of songs and more like an engineered environment, a space with its own logic, atmosphere, and gravity. MORGAN and BALDEROSE are no strangers to folding cinematic ideas into their work, but here that influence feels particularly structural. The EP moves with the tension and release of a move score, though stripped of narrative hand-holding and pushed into something far more physical.

BLOODRAVE is full of layering, but never comes across muddled. Synths snarl and scrape, fragments of sampled voices surface and dissolve, and strange technological shivers drift across the sonic field. There’s a lot happening at once, yet the mix has enough negative space for each texture to matter. Each element is masterfully calibrated to generate that mesmerising, continuous flow you fall into almost involuntarily.

What’s most compelling about this EP is that, on paper, it should seem incredibly niche: an abrasive blend of industrial, noise, and techno from members of a boundary-pushing metal band. Yet the execution feels surprisingly accessible, not because the music is softened or tailored for a mainstream audience, but because its identity is so fully realised. It has the unpredictability of a Boiler Room set where the DJ tests the crowd’s tolerance, but with a darker backbone and a sharper sense of design. It’s distinctive enough to hook listeners who crave experimentation, and cohesive enough to pull in those who don’t usually venture this far into the underground. BLOODRAVE succeeds because it doesn’t mimic a scene, it builds its own. 

Score: 9/10

BLOODRAVE will be released on November 21st 2025.

Words: Zuzanna Pazola

Photos: NOWHERE2RUN