Joseph, What Have You Done?

Trauma permeates Rainy Miller’s music—it’s sodden with it, like an overcoat peeled off after a downpour. Sometimes he expresses it through violent outbursts—spoken-word screeds that turn anger both outwards at the world, and inwards at the id. Other times, that hurt is sublimated, swaddled in Auto-Tune and ambient textures. Still present, but buried, made numb.

Hailing from Preston, in Lancashire, Miller is one of a loose fraternity of artists with roots in North West England—see also aya, Blackhaine, and Iceboy Violet—taking grime, drill, and club music and retooling it as a sort of avant-garde confessional art. Joseph, What Have You Done? sits loosely in the idiom of sadboi post-Drake rap. But in Miller’s hands, the form dissolves, manifesting in sheets of rumbling noise or gentle tides of synth that hit like a warm rush of intoxication.

Miller figured out the building blocks of this sound on 2022’s Desquamation (Fire, Burn. Nobody). On Joseph, What Have You Done?, he’s learning how to locate his struggle on a wider canvas, lacing his confessionals with Biblical imagery and memories from his Lancashire upbringing. One of the record’s influences is Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, a 2003 BBC travelogue around the American South hosted by the country singer Jim White. Miller recognized something in White’s journey that chimed with his own lived experience: a landscape of nowhere towns populated by people who refuse to let their disadvantage dislodge their pride in themselves and their communities. On Joseph, What Have You Done?, Miller sets out to transpose that film’s documentarian approach to his Lancastrian ends, creating an aesthetic that he calls “Northern Gothic.”

The album begins on a note of grim prophecy. “We were born with a mark on our backs,” mutters Miller at the start of “Mud in My Mouth. (Predetermined Definitions).” That pronouncement is the opening for a monologue that builds in intensity. “You was born to be nothing,” he repeats, and the track peaks right at the moment you hear his voice crack with emotion, the breaking point where anger crumbles into sorrow.

Depression and dispossession hang over Joseph, What Have You Done? like a storm cloud. They’re there in “Toddbrook Dam, 2019.” and “Mary Magdalene, as a Home.,” King Krule-esque ballads on which Miller accompanies his pained mumble with strumming and simple arpeggios on an acoustic guitar. And they linger throughout the moody psychogeography of “Then Casts Shadows, From Afar (A6 - Pendleton).,” a love letter to someone unnamed but now absent, told from the threadbare seat of a bus somewhere on the dual carriageway between Manchester and Preston. Accentuating the album’s documentary sensibility, Miller scatters voice notes throughout—off-the-cuff monologues muttered into a phone that often pack a devastating payload. On “Marked, 2020.,” he recalls an accidental sighting of his estranged biological father near Preston’s St George’s Shopping Centre—and the resulting emotional fallout.

For all the gloom, though, Joseph, What Have You Done? is determined to deny prophecy—to free itself from the curse of its birthright and find its way to a better place. Sometimes this desire for transcendence is stamped into the fabric of the music—see “Chrome. Hallowed Be.,” a surging junglist anthem that takes flight on angelic Auto-Tuned vocals and cinematic synthesized strings. Other times, it feels like Miller is trying to explode his way out of a rut. “Vengeance.” is a squall of crunchy noise and clanking breakbeats with a vocal cameo from Graham Sayle of the UK hardcore group High Vis, while “An Obsidian Lake Flows Out of Me.” hinges on a tumultuous percussive battery by the Danish jazz drummer J. Ludvig III. Immediately after, another voice note: “I think I’ve experienced delirium only, like, three times.” A wry pause for effect. “At least in a negative sense.”

Rainy Miller’s stark candor can be both a strength and a weakness. What makes his music dramatic and provoking also makes it unpleasantly harrowing in places; listening can be like witnessing the picking of a scab. On Joseph, What Have You Done? he’s finding new ways to communicate, processing trauma by pulling back the lens and articulating his struggle into a piece in a wider, older story. You stick around in the hope of salvation—and it comes. The album concludes with its title track: a starry-eyed paean to the people of Lancashire vocalized by Miller’s collaborator, the Manchester-based artist Christ Bryan, and wrapped in tear-stained synths and yearning strings courtesy of more eaze. It’s the sort of track that might feel slightly saccharine were it not for the hard yards that got us here. As it is, you feel relieved for Miller: that he made it out alive, not quite healed, but at least healing.