The new collaboration between Istanbul-based screamo/punk band pembe and experimental rapper Rinxlaya doesn’t ask for permission. “I Wish I Could Break Away from My Roots When I Look Back” is a title that reads like a diary entry scratched into a wall—raw, private, meant to be buried but instead blown up for everyone to hear.
Released via Mevzu Records, the track is a jarring fusion of DIY hardcore and warped trap, violent in both its emotion and form. It feels less like a song and more like a breakdown caught on tape.
Built around sudden shifts and unresolved tension, the song was produced by pembe and features vocals from both artists. Rinxlaya’s delivery moves like a ghost with a grudge—spoken, screamed, then swallowed by electronic decay—while pembe pour everything into their chaotic crescendos. It’s a fight scene between genres, made with blood ties and bruises.
The lyrics are in Turkish, and the translated title “Arkama Bakınca Köklerimden Kopmayı Dilerim” (I wish I could break away from my roots when I look back) doesn’t soften anything. It underlines a persistent theme: wanting to escape not just a place, but the legacy of pain it handed down. The track doesn’t offer closure. It circles, loops, breaks, and collapses under its own weight—on purpose.
pembe’s roots are in Istanbul’s underground—members have played in ria, Hedonistic Noise, Jornada Del Muerto—and their past work channels personal and collective grief into bursts of sound. They describe their music as “the depressive yet optimistic explosion of shared traumas,” and that contradiction plays out here in full force.
Rinxlaya, known from the M4NM collective and earlier releases like Denek00 (2021), brings a different edge. His style is slippery and unsettling—somewhere between performance art and panic attack. His lyrics lurch forward in fragments, shaped by unease and sharp social commentary. His voice in this track is less a guide and more a warning signal.
View this post on Instagram
The music video, directed by Eren Karatepe, looks like it was pulled from the final hours of a failed utopia. The visuals are not literal—they’re about sensation: claustrophobic interiors, blurred bodies, controlled decay.
The performers move like they’re resisting gravity, pushed and pulled by invisible forces. There’s no narrative arc, just survival through disorientation. The cast includes Kunty, Jan, Hazal, and İrma Yahuska, with art and costume direction by Hazal Çevik and prop styling by Jan. Rinx coordinated set costumes.
The editing, handled by Mutlu Oral and Rinxlaya, mirrors the fractured nature of the song—cutting from pain to detachment in a matter of frames. Color grading, also by Oral, gives it that drained, haunted texture.
The video was filmed at SBCS, a space that seems to collapse around the performers as they move through it. Make-up by Zece and Kunty, and a strong visual presence from the cast, adds to the track’s emotional spine —nothing is stable here, nothing is fixed. Only movement remains.
