On his third album, the former Speedy Ortiz guitarist continues to carve out space for Black perspectives in indie rock while expanding his musical range in surprising ways.
After parting ways with Speedy Ortiz in 2017, Brooklyn-based musician Devin McKnight adopted the moniker Maneka to experiment with genres beyond his indie-rock roots and explore spaces not overpopulated by white dudes. On Is You Is, McKnight began wrestling with his sense of identity in a scene that, even after 20 years of progress, can still feel exclusionary of BIPOC musicians. McKnight came into his own on Devin in 2019, and he cranked his energy up to 11 by blending heavy metal and noise-punk with hip hop and jazz. On Dark Matter, McKnight continues to ask what it means to be Black in the indie scene while expanding his musical range in surprising ways.
McKnight likens America’s racist history to dark matter—an invisible force that binds the country together. “America has this really dark energy. How has it been this fucked up for so long and no one’s done anything about it?” he has said. On Dark Matters, he confronts that energy directly, writing lyrics that attack racism at its roots. On “Winners Circle,” an unusual fusion of trap drums, shoegaze guitars, and a double-time hardcore outro, he plays on the theory that Beethoven might have been a person of color who lightened his skin to pass in his own scene, singing, “Don’t paint a smile in the place where that shame hid/Play that brand new shit/That No. 9 shit.” On “The Glow Up,” he grapples with generations of racism—“And how do you explain this?/The seat in the back is meant for me?/And how do you explain this?/The ones we lost hanging from the trees”—over syrupy electric bass and guitar. And on the psychedelic “Runaway,” over dueling electric and acoustic guitars, he comes brutally to the point: “Stored in the bones/Is the feeling/You don’t belong here.”
Dark Matter’s twists and turns can be unusual, even unsettling. That’s intentional. When a musician like Alex G pivots genres on his records, they can make for a fun, experimental detour on the road to melodic indie rock. But McKnight seems determined to never let you get too comfortable, and he changes the mood from track to track. The synth-laden intro to the album pulsates like the theme song to a PBS documentary from the early 1980s, then cuts immediately into the spaced-out shoegaze of “Zipline.” The first of two brief improvisational jazz tracks featuring Chicago musician Nnamdi Ogbonnaya on drums is sandwiched between the experimental trap beat of “Winner’s Circle” and the jangly bedroom pop of “The Glow Up”; the other sits between the synth-driven grunge anthem “On Her Own” and the mellow post-rock of “Maintain.” McKnight uses these deliberate genre switches to reinforce the idea that indie rock can speak to those who don’t always see themselves reflected in the bands at the forefront of the scene. But the unfortunate side effect of the constant shifts is that they occasionally prevent the album from feeling entirely cohesive.
Dark Matters rarely thrashes as hard as Maneka’s earlier work, but McKnight’s songwriting sounds more purposeful than ever. He says volumes in this cool, innovative half hour of music. In a year that has given us double albums from Big Thief and Beach House, Dark Matters’ inspiring, genre-bending songs offer a breath of fresh air: In place of sprawl, McKnight cuts to the chase by offering an unflinching look at his own truth.
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