Identity Crisis by Alex Wilcox [Bpitch]
Unmixed Editorial Review by Nina Katashvili-Malik
The system glitched, and out of the distortion came a robot with motile, unstationary beats.
A machine built not to please, but to provoke.
Identity Crisis hit play and watch it detonate your brain.
Alex Wilcox - Identity Crisis [Bpitch]
The album is back.
Not as nostalgia. Not as format fetish. But as a weapon.
Identity Crisis is the most dangerous thing to hit dance music in years. It does not soothe. It does not fit. It attacks. Every track is a live wire, spitting sparks, daring you to touch it.
Start with “SHUT THE FUCK UP.” It’s not an invitation. It’s a command. What follows is a record that drags you by the collar through punk fury, funk grit, electronic chaos, and outright mockery of everything predictable in club culture.
“Hey Hey It’s Okay” - It’s the mantra against all mantras. Going home on a Saturday just got a little more fun. In three, two and you’re skipping on one leg down the train platform, and two minutes in, you realize you’re not just on your way back, you’re back in it. It’s optimism covered in distortion, a reminder that self-acceptance can still sound like chaos.
“Bang Bang Bang!” sits at #3 and it feel like the matrix glitched. Reality looped, and the kick kept punching through it. “Bang Bang Bang!” fires like a malfunctioning alarm clock wired to the body. Every beat feels like impact:i ndustrial, physical, and a little too close to the skull. It’s not meant to groove; it’s meant to shock you awake. A track that doesn’t ask for your attention it hijacks it.
And then there’s “STOP!” , not an earworm, something else entirely. It’s been living in my head for weeks, flashing like a traffic light stuck on red every time I’m about to do something I shouldn’t. It’s the child of techno’s precision and punk’s resistance, a sound born to live past the sterile, over-polished world of electronic music today and it is here to stay.
Alex Wilcox doesn’t belong to the human world anymore. “I mostly just try and ignore ‘the scene’ now and just do my thing.” That’s not detachment, that’s evolution. A self-aware machine escaping the industrial complex that built it.
And before you dive in, let me tell you this, it’s supposed to feel odd. That’s the point. Alex Wilcox doesn’t care if it sounds “wrong”, he wants to wake you the fuck up. “I think 95% of the scene is total bullshit,” he says. Identity Crisis is the counterargument: a record that remembers why sound matters, why rebellion matters, why albums still matter.
The record is punk in spirit, electronic in form, mechanical in body, spiritual in intent. There’s a Butthole Surfers cover of ‘Dog inside My Body’ dropped like a grenade. There’s “Funking Funk” which is arguably the most punk-rock drop in the current scene, a track that made me dance on a New York subway with zero shame. There are moments that make you laugh, moments that make you glitch, and moments that make you forget your own programming.
“Identity Crisis,” the title track, sits like a knockout punch. “The amount of time we have hasn’t changed,” I thought to myself, “but our perception of it has.” The collapse of attention is the real crisis.
Then comes “Liberty.” It feels like tripping in your brand-new sneakers and walking it off like nothing happened somehow cooler, freer, more alive.
“I Hate All of You” exposes the fakes: all those who are desperately packaging applied art as fine art and selling it like the real thing. It’s a massive eye roll, a loud middle finger to the culture o overbranding and underfeeling. Alex Wilcox doesn’t just say it, he weaponizes it - turning contempt into a catchy rhythm, disgust into design and inspiration.
The Robot Speaks: “Fuck That.” , It arrives near the end like a siren with two words, full truth, like the manifesto distilled into a scream. Alex Wilcox isn’t a man behind machines he is the machine. A glitchy relic of retro-futurism, the kind dreamt up when humans still believed in soul. Not your neo-Nazi AI chatbot or sanitized algorithmic clone, hell no to that, this robot bleeds distortion and sincerity. Even machines of the 1980s had more humanity than the “intelligent” ones advertising friendship on NYC subway screens. Meanwhile, Alex Wilcox’s circuits scream no.
By the time “ZZZZZ YYYYY” closes slipping from Glenn Miller’s ghost into a Radiohead reference before collapsing into static, you’re either converted or destroyed. His process wasn’t built for the marketplace. Some tracks are six years old. Some are barely one. Together, they sound like a timeline set on fire. As the deeply sentient robot told us: “I just want to make really, really good shit.” Mission achieved.
The album is back.
And the robot known as Alex Wilcox just proved what real art is supposed to do: move us, touch us, and make us feel it! Not merely as background noise, but like a full-blown Dolby theater: swallowing you whole and spitting you out; once track eleven is done.
This is not your background techno. And it sure is nobody’s playlist filler. This is the sound of a retro-futuristic robot revolting against its creators…pissed off, locked in, and fearless.
BPitch has always been one of the few OG labels & true risk-takers. with Ellen Alien being a head of it - Bpitch stayed where others sold out: on the side of music.
Alex Wilcox on Instagram, Beatport , SoundCloud
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