Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals Do Not Hold Back
Few openers in recent memory set the tone of an album quite like Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals’ “The Iron Wall.” It’s immediately nerve-shredding, as producer Infinity Knives (né Tariq Ravelomanana) programs an atonal sequence and jittery drums that tumble over each other like a charging rock slide. When rapper Brian Ennals sneers “Yo” a second before his verse, it’s like he’s bumping boxing gloves together, but his first two lines land like a brass knuckles uppercut: “For four generations, your boots up on they neck/ October 7th happened, the fuck did you expect?”
“The Iron Wall,” named after a 1923 essay written by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Russia-born Revisionist Zionist thought leader, is a clear-eyed anti-Zionist screed, a clarion callout of the politicians and ideologies perpetuating the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. There’s no subtlety in Ennals’ writing: “Genocide is American as apple pie, baseball, and mass shootings.” Halfway through, the bottom falls out, becoming a disorienting flurry, with sirens blaring against peripatetic cymbals and handclaps. The track rights itself, accenting Ennals’ final verse with towering synth chords. It’s a staring contest, and you’re not going to win.
“The Iron Wall” perfectly sets up the rest of A City Drowned In God’s Black Tears, one of the most thrilling, exploratory, and emotionally draining albums of the year. Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals are ostensibly a rap group, but it feels reductive to call God’s Black Tears a rap album. Terming it “experimental” is nebulous to the point of insult. The artists never let you get comfortable, as Ravelomanana’s compositions twist and turn unexpectedly, and Ennals writes blunt, unsparing lyrics that dissect racism, rape culture, and mental illness. The third song, “A City Drowning. God’s Black Tears,” begins as delicate psych-folk, a pirouetting fingerpicked guitar figure looming like a thunderhead before exploding into an enormous blast of doom metal. The chugging closer “O Trouble” sounds like a lost Stax demo caked in dirt. The rap songs here swerve unpredictably from trap (“BAGGY,” “Soft Pack Shorty”) to cumbia (“Sometimes, Papi Chulo”) to roller rink disco (“Everyone I Love Is Depressed”). There’s not much to compare it to — not even Knives and Ennals’ previous records. It’s quite an achievement, albeit one that came at great cost to its creators.
A month after its release, I’m sitting in the passenger seat of Ennals’ friend’s SUV, the three of us cruising through their home base of Baltimore. Neither are native to the city; Ravelomanana was born in Tanzania and spent an itinerant childhood living in places like Madagascar, Kenya, South Africa, and Arkansas before his family settled in Baltimore when he was 14; Ennals was born in Annapolis, MD and grew up in Severn, a census-designated-place near BWI that’s now a nascent suburb. He moved to Baltimore with a girlfriend after graduating from Howard University but has since returned to Anne Arundel County, which stretches from Linthicum Heights down to Rosehaven and includes Glen Burnie, Severn, and Annapolis. They both know the city’s every corner, pointing out landmarks like the Crown, a storied, now-shuttered Station North bar where they played their first show; the high school where Ennals’ dad worked as a principal; and the corner of Erdman and Belair, which Ravelomanana calmly tells me is the most dangerous intersection in America.
The guys are warm and personable, ragging on each other with the ease that comes from over a decade of being close friends and collaborators. They first met in 2013, after Ennals, who’d moved back to Baltimore after a brief stint in Newark, NJ, released his second solo album Candy Cigarettes. Ravelomanana read a review of it in the Baltimore Sun and created a Twitter account solely to get in touch with Ennals. They became fast friends and slowly, but surely, inched towards making music together. Their debut album, Rhino XXL, arrived in July 2020. They released their second album, the incendiary, ’80s-hip-hop-indebted King Cobra, in 2022.
Apprehension hangs in the air when our conversation turns to the new album. The rollout had been eventful, capitalizing on momentum built from critical praise for King Cobra, two years spent touring in Europe, and a US support slot for Irish rap group Kneecap. Influential YouTuber F.D. Signifier shared “The Iron Wall,” then passed the record to the even more influential Anthony Fantano, whose music review channel boasts a whopping 3 million subscribers. Fantano gave God’s Black Tears an eight out of 10. “That tripled our streaming numbers,” says Ennals. “Like, pretty much overnight.” But when I first ask, point blank, “Are you proud of the record?” Ravelomanana shrugs. “Not really,” he says, pausing for a moment before adding, “I mean, there are songs I like on it.” Ennals says he’s “proud when people tell me they fuck with it,” and it feels like a sigh of relief, like he’s glad it’s behind him. “I listen to it and think, ‘I should’ve rapped like I did on King Cobra, more tongue-twisty and intricate.'” There’s a brief silence, and Ravelomanana adds, “Honestly, this album ruined my fucking life.”
At several points during the day, Ravelomanana declares, “I am in so much pain,” considering the aftermath. “I was angry, I was short, I was temperamental. I was neglectful of my partner. Brian and I fought a lot the whole time.” He felt a need to push himself further with this record, but that pressure built to a destructive pitch. “That shit doesn’t come natural,” he says, a tinge of anguish in his voice. “It takes a chunk of your brain or soul every time.” Ravelomanana describes himself as an obsessive composer, with a fastidious process where he constantly tweaks small details. In a 2021 interview with NPR, he described his approach to crafting the score for the Invisibilia podcast, which he painstakingly assembled from over 30 hours of loops and scraps of noise. For God’s Black Tears, Ravelomanana worked closely with Frances Malvaiz, a Baltimore musician and recording engineer who records solo as FRANKI3 and as half of Jupiter Rex, her duo with her partner, engineer and multi-instrumentalist Griffin Murphy. “I helped [Tariq] shape the sounds and melodies he heard in his head and bring his inner chaos to the mix,” she tells me in an email. “With a lot of the guest appearances on the album, I was a translator between Tariq [and the] vocalists to convey what Tariq wanted from them.”
Ravelomanana poured himself entirely into the songs, meticulously concocting intricate arrangements that blend dense layers of electronic and acoustic instruments. Almost all of God’s Black Tears was recorded at Malvaiz and Murphy’s home studio, the basement of a detached house on a Hampden side street. A drum set sits near the back of the space, surrounded by baffling, and an array of amps and synthesizers line the walls. An upright piano with an open lid sits adjacent to the vintage Soundmaster mixing board, various metal accoutrements that suggest Fluxus-style treatments scattered nearby. A behind-the-scenes Instagram carousel shows Ravelomanana in the studio playing the dizzying acoustic guitar arpeggios from the album’s title track, creating peals of feedback, and capturing a circuit board soldering session. Ravelomanana and Ennals started working with Malvaiz and Murphy around 2022, and the four have developed what Malvaiz describes as a “symbiotic relationship.” “Griffin works a lot with Brian on tracking his vocals, as they have a system in their workflow,” says Malvaiz. “I work a lot with Tariq on instrumentation and melody, and engineering the studio sessions.” She describes the sessions as a “chaotic journey” but stresses that they felt more like fulfilling friend hangs than work.
But throughout the making of the album, Ravelomanana felt constantly beaten down. King Cobra had achieved fairly significant critical acclaim, and they’d been able to tour internationally to promote the record, but he was still barely making ends meet. When I ask him if it’s getting more difficult to dedicate himself to music, he insists that he has to be pragmatic. “The name ‘Infinity Knives’ comes from this book, The Blade Itself [by Joe Abercrombie], and it’s been coming back a lot,” he says. “At one point, the protagonist says, ‘You have to be realistic about these things.’ Am I being realistic about [pursuing music]? I don’t really know.”
The destruction of Gaza also took a particularly hefty toll on his mental health, and his anger pushed him and Ennals to write “The Iron Wall.” “I grew up near the Congo,” he explains. “The [International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda] was in the town where I was born, so genocide and ethnic cleansing have always been things I’m aware of.” Watching pundits and politicians dismiss, downplay, or equivocate about what was happening was deeply painful and extremely enraging. “[‘The Iron Wall’] was going to be way more offensive if I had Brian’s pen,” he says. “He had to tell me to chill out.”
In a text message a couple of weeks before I’m set to travel up to Baltimore, Ravelomanana told me he and his longtime partner have split up. It’s couched in a request to contact one of his collaborators, but the late-night timestamp suggests something a bit more impulsive. Two days after the text, Knives and Ennals played their release show at Holy Frijoles, a Hampden bar and venue known for raucous metal shows. Ravelomanana blacked out on a potent cocktail of alcohol and Xanax, and, according to Ennals, put on one of the best performances of his career. “It was raw as fuck,” Ennals says emphatically. “Tariq was lit, bouncing all over the fucking place, going into the crowd.” Ravelomanana doesn’t speak joyously about the night, telling me in no uncertain terms that he was probably trying to die. “Don’t kill yourself,” responds Ennals plainly, bringing to mind the chorus to “Everyone I Know Is Depressed,” a late-album highlight on God’s Black Tears. Snapping back into himself, Ravelomanana immediately jokes: “You’re right, no one’s gonna give you heat if I’m gone. You’re gonna have to start getting beat packs.” Ennals groans, and they both laugh.
“This place saved me last year,” Ennals tells me as he applies a generous amount of horseradish to a plate of raw oysters. We’re sitting at a picnic table on the market side of Anne Arundel Seafood in Pasadena, Maryland, a quiet, sprawling suburb about half an hour south of Baltimore. It’s a decidedly no-frills joint, the kind of place locals would lovingly refer to as a “hole in the wall.” Beers are self-serve from a built-in cooler in the counter; the brown butcher paper that covers the tabletops makes for easy cleanup of cracked crab shells and squeezed lemon slices; shuckers stack oysters on the half shell onto flimsy paper plates. Fluorescent lights hum above a dingy, changeable-letter menu board. It’s a spot equally suited for celebrating birthdays or anniversaries as it is for sitting quietly, disappearing in plain sight.
Ennals spent much of the year detached from himself, floating through his days in a boozy haze. “I got laid off and lost my health insurance, so I stopped going to therapy and stopped taking my medication,” he explains. “You convince yourself you’re doing okay for a while, like, ‘It’s not the medication that’s making me healthy. It was just me!’ Obviously, it wasn’t just you, because you’re insane.” He fell back into some harsh old drinking habits, and for much of 2024, his days followed the same self-destructive routine: Wake up, get a pint of liquor, drain it by midday, get another pint around 1 p.m., drink half of it, head home, finish the rest. “It was exhausting,” he says. “That’s a hard way to live.” On Thursdays, he’d stumble over to Anne Arundel Seafood for dollar oyster night, washing down a couple dozen with cheap beer.
Ennals’ experience making God’s Black Tears wasn’t the hyperfixated intensity Ravelomanana describes, but more of a disinterested resignation. “I was listening to a lot of Tupac,” he says of his mindset. “Because that’s what you do when you drink a lot.” At certain points, Ravelomanana tells me, Ennals had to be convinced to come lay down his vocals. “I had to catch him on days when he was sober,” Ravelomanana says, “but, to his credit, when I did catch Brian lucid, we would have very concentrated conversations. I’d get as much out of him as I could.” When they made King Cobra, Ennals describes their focus as “almost surgical.” “We were on the phone multiple times a week, talking about specific songs. We had these big listening and writing sessions where he’d play multiple beats and we’d choose the ones [we wanted to make into songs].” In contrast, Ennals says he didn’t offer Ravelomanana any feedback while they put God’s Black Tears together. “It was the first time that he would give me a beat, and I would just write to it and lay it down,” he says, “as opposed to me sending him the vocals and asking ‘What do you think about this?’ or ‘Change this about the beat.’ It was just, ‘You got a beat? I’ll rap to it.”
As we stack our empty oyster shells and swig the last sips of our Heinekens, Ennals and Ravelomanana detail the consecutive wake-up calls that shook Ennals out of his spiral and helped them take God’s Black Tears across the finish line. First was a car accident. All told, it was relatively minor — no one was hurt, the damage to both cars was minimal, and there were no legal repercussions — but it shook them both. “I probably should have gotten a DUI,” Ennals admits.
Then, a particularly brutal hangover in September 2024 felt a little too close to rock bottom. The night before a planned studio session, Ennals had gotten exceptionally drunk and done a “ton of blow.” He’d developed some stomach issues over the year, which he attributed to the drinking, and that morning, the pain was extraordinary. To ease the spasming, he drank a quart of milk, which triggered some explosive vomiting by the time he pulled up to Ravelomanana’s apartment. “I came in and was bloodshot and shaking,” he says. “It was the worst I’d ever been.” Ravelomanana set him up in his roommate’s bed, gave him some Ativan and DMT (“That was a roll of the dice,” Ravelomanana says with a chuckle), and Ennals stayed put, drying out for the next 24 hours. “Then I was good. It was a rough day — shit, it was a rough year,” he says matter-of-factly. “The thing is, you can’t get into self-pity about it. Some people have rough decades.” He stayed completely sober for the next two weeks, reevaluating and recalibrating his relationship with substances.
Their bracing honesty is refreshing. It’s a little jarring to hear such frank discussion of the depths, but it’s not surprising given the intensity of their music. Both are blisteringly candid about nearly everything in their lives, from their drug use to their political views, and that unblinking nature can be polarizing. “I don’t think we want to be edgy,” says Ravelomanana hesitantly, “I just think we’re general dickheads. We say a lot of foul shit.” “Never punching down,” Ennals quickly interjects. On the subject of his harsher lines — like the opening of “BAGGY” where he stares into the camera and deadpans, “Kobe Bryant was a rapist and he paid for that” — Ennals says, “People think I’m sitting around thinking of some shocking thing to say, but it’s literally just how I talk.” And even though they can come off as Molotov-throwing rebels, they don’t claim to be revolutionaries by any stretch, just regular folks radicalized by the grotesque reality of poverty. Simply waking up every day and looking around — especially in Baltimore, a city ravaged by a particularly American cocktail of corruption, racism, and neglect — is enough to warrant the righteous anger found on an Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals album.
Despite their mixed feelings about God’s Black Tears (“No, it’s fucking dope,” Ennals finally concedes later in the day), the record is enjoying a glowing, if slow-burning, critical reception. The group was recently picked up by Jamboree Mgmt, a Portland-based artist management and PR company that also reps Tropical Fuck Storm, Ravelomanana’s favorite band. Each week since the album’s release, new announcements of tour dates, one-offs, and festival appearances show up on social media. Last year’s tour with Kneecap gave them a much-needed boost of confidence. “It changed our standards and expectations,” Ravelomanana says. Ennals agrees: “As self-deprecating as we can be about our music, we’re also very arrogant about it. Nobody’s doing it like we’re doing it, so fuck it, you know what I mean?”
They’ve kept themselves busy with new projects, as well. Ravelomanana helped former Baltimorean Will Ryerson shape his latest Giant Wave album, Year Of Space, connecting Ryerson with collaborators and offering suggestions for production and sequencing. Ennals features on two of the Giant Wave tracks and has been working on songs with legendary New York underground producer Blockhead, and an album with perennially underrated Philadelphia rapper/producer andrew has been moving apace. When I first arrive in Baltimore, Ennals takes me straight to the Hampden studio, where he and Griffin Murphy knock down several guest verses in quick succession. He and Ravelomanana have also been sketching out the next duo record, compiling a vast Spotify playlist of sounds they want to mine. But for now, they’re learning to more graciously accept the record they’ve made, figuring out how to play these songs live, and navigating a rapidly growing fan base. It’s exciting, but not without its frustrations. “Brian and I are always doing all this shit, and you question whether you’re worth it,” Ravelomanana says. “And it sucks because everyone just thinks ‘Infinity Knives’ is the group,” he adds with a sharp laugh, explaining that he gets the all the DMs — angry rants from Zionists and loving praise from fans — who don’t realize that “and Brian Ennals” is the other half of their name.
As we get back into the city, there’s a bit of time before they have to drop me back at the train station, so we stop by the Charles Village apartment Ravelomanana shared with his ex. He needs to move his stuff out, but it’ll take a few visits, so he grabs only the most essential things, which include his SP-404 sampler and boxes of the group’s merch. As he’s loading everything into the back of the SUV, a young man walking by slows down, a look of excited recognition on his face. “Excuse me, Infinity Knives?” Ravelomanana, mind miles away, looks up. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“Oh man, hell yeah. I just wanted to say that the new record is so sick! I was just listening to it yesterday.”
“Cool, thanks, man.”
Ennals pops out from behind Ravelomanana and says, “And I’m Brian Ennals!” The young man looks confused, and after a beat, quietly exclaims, “Alright, hell yeah! Anyway, the record’s great.” As he walks away, the three of us look at each other, smile, shrug, and get back in the car.
