Manchester-based artist Iceboy Violet will release their third album, How to Glitch Under the Map, on November 4th via Fixed Abode.
The record follows 2024’s You Said You’d Hold My Hand Through the Fire, released via Hyperdub, and marks Iceboy’s return to Rainy Miller’s northern imprint for the first time since 2023. They’ve described the decision simply, saying the label is “on its way to becoming a legendary” one and that returning gives them the chance to grow alongside it and help define its identity.
The album takes its title from the idea of clipping underneath the map in a video game, revealing the underside of a world never meant to be seen from there, a metaphor Iceboy applies to their own life and work. Having moved between Bradford, Jamaica and Manchester from a young age, they explore what it means to lose a sense of home, finding refuge instead in the internet’s stranger, liminal spaces. The record also grapples with how the internet’s original promise of anonymity and freedom has been swallowed by concentrated technological power and surveillance capitalism, reflected in a web of convulsive beats that shift between weightless and searingly industrial.
Primer track ‘Reflect//Deflect (Ghost Image)’ is a haunting, grime-inspired cut centred on the permanence of ghost images, the phenomenon where a static image burns into old CRT television screens. Its Sinogrime-esque synth melody was originally made eight years ago, reworked in stages over that time, picked up, reversed, added to and set aside again and again. Iceboy has said the result doesn’t feel like it was built in pieces, but that “it feels like it was all from one place.”
How to Glitch Under the Map is out November 4th via Fixed Abode.
