The Chronicles of Manimal and Samara have built “Misantropi” as a direct argument against AI music. Real instruments. Real bodies. No generative tools anywhere on the record, including the only music video they’ve made for it.
The London duo of Daphne Ang from Singapore and Andrea Papi from Italy, working together since early 2020, deliver their fourth studio album on June 12 via 12″ vinyl through tcomas.com. Recording, production, mixing, mastering, artwork: all of it handled by people they could shake hands with. The tagline is “for humans who hate people,” which is also a fair summary of where the band are sitting right now.
The lineage of this stance runs back four years. “The Prophet“, from their second album “Trust No Leaders” (2022), warned about what AI could do to human creativity. The new record makes that warning the whole project, escalated to a register the band themselves describe as a fuck you to artificial perfection. “Our drive to create and to find meaning, that is our one redeeming trait,” they write. “Without this, humanity is nothing but a fucking disease.”
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That position didn’t come from nowhere. In the past, the duo have written from a stance of stubborn hope, the kind that holds the world is broken but trending less broken.
“Recent times have challenged our ability to see a positive future,” they explain. “We’ve struggled to find even a sliver of hope for where we are all heading.” “Our rotten brains become dulled by doomscrolling and reliance on chatbots to make decisions for us,” they add, fingering the daily mechanism. “Misantropi” is what comes out of that headspace. The album, in their words, was born from “our struggles, joys, and imperfections.”
After recording their third album “Origins” in 2024, Papi (the Manimal half of the duo) didn’t pick up an instrument for nearly a year. “I started to believe I had lost my inspiration for good,” he says. “I convinced myself I was probably done with music because perhaps I simply had nothing left to say. A bit depressed? Yes, but also at peace with myself.” He treats music as a therapeutic release valve, and the year of silence almost convinced him he’d been cured.
Then the AI music platforms started landing. The first wave hit him with what he calls childhood-grade hope: maybe this would unlock cures for cancer, access to the 97% of the brain we apparently can’t reach. What actually arrived was software letting “any prick spit out studio-quality tracks in seconds, without knowing anything about music at all.” He felt pity at first. Then he remembered: “I FUCKING HATE PEOPLE and the choices they make for money.”
The rage turned into riffs. Over roughly two months he wrote and recorded 19 tracks. Nine of them made “Misantropi”. The process started on a semi-acoustic guitar, with drums and bass added later. A natural regression, in his words, away from the digital era he was reacting against. The result, in the band’s own words, is “more RAW, more HUMAN.”
Ang worked at the opposite tempo. “Writing didn’t unfold as a sudden, cascading tour de force for me,” she says. “Instead, it emerged gradually over months, and for some songs even over a year.” The split this time around had her handling vocals, lyrics, and visuals while Papi took the music. Their songwriting has always been a creative symbiosis. This album just had the labor divided cleanly, with the rage and frustration from events at home and across the world feeding her side of it.
The vocal parts began in her head, as rhythmic patterns and melodies that took shape during recording. Some arrived instantly. Others got built on a keyboard before they made it to tape. What changed audibly is the singing. “Misantropi” leans more melodic than anything else in their catalogue, with Ang reaching well past the spoken word and poetry approach that’s been their signature since the first album. “I felt the need for an intensity that could not be achieved by using only a spoken voice. I had to summon every version of myself that I could deliver vocally.”
Once tracking was finished, the duo handed the record to Marinos Tountas at Ergosphere Studios for mixing and mastering. Another long stretch of collaboration with another human being, in line with everything else about the project.
The themes sit close to the surface. “Cannibal Mind” looks at the dark things humans do to one another, including the people they love. “Superstupidity” runs on a single thesis: human intelligence has its limits, but human stupidity is boundless. Opener “Misantropia” is built as a cathartic anthem for misanthropic rage, and the title track stands as the album’s mission statement.
It’s also the only song on the record that got a music video. Ang made a conceptual choice to use zero generative AI material in it, instead trawling public domain archives of 20th century film. The visuals cut between human innovation and human destruction, the good deeds and the bad. “It became clear,” she says, “that our ability to create and innovate has been overshadowed by our capacity for corruption and destruction.”
The closing position on the AI cashcow is unambiguous. “Fake music,” the band write of one-click song generators. “No sweat. No pain. No soul. Super polished, pitch perfect tracks that say fucking nothing.” They suspect the average listener won’t care whether what’s playing was made by a person, which is exactly what makes major labels see a business. “It looks like the major record labels have found their perfect cashcow.”
For all the venom, the position isn’t anti-technology. “We are not against progress and AI,” the duo make clear. The complaint is about people. “In the end, it will be the faults of some fucking people. So, fuck you in advance, we hope you all die before you create more problems.”
“Misantropi” is the band’s fourth self-produced album, following “Full Spectrum”, “Trust No Leaders”, and “Origins”. The last of those landed in the Apple Music Album Chart Top 100 in the UK. Second single “The Last Plague” already pulled placements on Apple Music’s Breaking Metal and Breaking Hard Rock editorial playlists, charted in six countries, and reached number one on the Metal chart in Liberia. The duo’s self-produced music videos have collected 66 official selections and nominations at international film festivals.
“Misantropi” is out June 12, 2026, on 12″ vinyl.
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