The 24-year-old alt-pop rapper showcases her newly refined confidence, taking a step toward the pop powerhouse she’s capable of becoming.
The 24-year-old alt-pop rapper Ashnikko commands fantasy and chaos with ease. She dresses as an eyeball-studded character for a performance of TikTok hit “Daisy” with just as much nonchalance as she posts photos of empty dildo containers stuffed with beans on Instagram. But Ashnikko’s unselfconscious brazenness is a newer phenomenon in her young career. Her earlier releases, while still defiant and bawdy, felt constrained by uncertain line delivery and sometimes-clunky production. She told Vulture that listening to her first EP Sass Pancakes made her want to cry, saying that only recently has she started to feel “like a songwriter.” Ashnikko’s latest mixtape, Demidevil, is a showcase for her newly refined confidence, a step towards the pop powerhouse she’s capable of becoming.
Like a lot of her fellow weird pop girls (think Princess Nokia and Slayyyter, with the former featured on this album), Ashnikko enthusiastically embraces the hallmarks of 2000s radio. You can hear it in the keyboard melody in “Slumber Party,” which honks with horny Pussycat Dolls insistence, or the track “L8r Boi,” which is a staunchly anti-skater boy rewrite of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi.”
But Demidevil is by no means limited to ’00s inspiration. “Toxic” and “Daisy” both dabble in bratty trap, while the Grimes-featuring “Cry” toys with nu-metal. Some genre experiments are less successful: “L8r Boi” is boringly faithful to its source material while the theatrical “Clitoris! The Musical” is as unsatisfyingly repetitive as the song’s clueless sexual antagonist. The lyrics on these experimental tracks are noticeably less artful, too. At one point on “Clitoris!” Ashnikko wonders “Why is my orgasm censored on the TV /While cis boys get to ejaculate freely?” A valid question, but it becomes less serious in the context of a jokey theater spoof.
Something that is thankfully consistent through all of Demidevil is Ashnikko’s humor and subversive personality. She tells untrustworthy boys “you can keep the image of my butt as a souvenir,” and admires someone else’s girlfriend for her “hentai boobies,” already having given her “cunnilingus on the couch.” In a world where “WAP” brought a tragic amount of men to the realization that they’re bad at sex, Ashnikko’s shameless odes to boobs, butts, and pussy, which she declares to be her religion on “Drunk With My Friends,” help challenge the expectations for what women can and can’t talk about. For most of music history, women pop stars have been expected to be perfect encapsulations of heterosexual sex, sultry when asked to be and angelic when not. Weird girl artists like Ashnikko crush that perfection under lucite heels, covered in your boyfriend’s blood.
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