La Haine by AlphaFox

Long Beach-based hip-hop/electronic producer Alphafox joined the Dome of Doom family in 2017 with the Before You're Gone EP and now he returns to the fold, scheduled to release his debut LP this February. Titled La Haine, the album is bass-heavy and brooding, with a monstrous sense of energy in its totality. The album features Three 6 Mafia's Gangsta Boo and A-Frame of the ROTU collective (Rebels of the Underground). Vocal samples are chopped and screwed, with tones that rattle the speakers like an earthquake. Unforgiving and emotionally potent, the energy rides at high-octane through the entire LP. 14 tracks and 32-minutes long, it's a distillation of varying sounds from the modern era. It adds an important chapter into his legacy as one of Southern, CA's more shadowed producers.

Recorded between 2018 and 2019, La Haine was inspired by the '90s black-and-white French film of the same name, initially released by director Mathieu Kassovitz in 1995 to critical acclaim. As a piece of cinema that offers a glimpse of trauma unlike few films of the 20th century, themes of human brutality, racial tension, and class wars are riddled throughout. Alphafox took this atmosphere as the guiding compass point to all the recording sessions and as a means to search the self, with sound design and rhythmic propulsion centered into the energetic resonance. Alphafox provides further context to the album's connection with the film, adding "La Haine means hate. I wanted this album to also help people come to terms with what they hate in their life or anything that they hate about themselves, and be at peace with it." It's laced with a level of tension rarely heard in electronic music and instrumental hip-hop.

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