“Artists that aren’t bound by any genre can do it all. We listen to whatever we want, we make whatever we want, we are whoever we want to be.” They sound like big words from Nyrobi until you hear Rave Immortal, the debut album by ALT BLK ERA, the duo she formed with her sister Chaya in Nottingham in the later stages of lockdown. Fearlessly bold in its vision and unbridled in its execution, this is an album seized by the shock of the urgent, an expression of defiant intention to be seen and heard and never again to be overlooked.

ALT BLK ERA are not just unbound by genre, they run circles around them. Listen to Rave Immortal and you hear the alt-metal of ‘Come on Outside’ rub shoulders with the earth-rumbling drum’n’bass pound of ‘Crashing Parties’. ‘Hunt You Down’ imagines a darkwave underworld version of Billie Eilish, while brash punk rap hyperfuels ‘Come Fight Me For It’. The dexterity is eye-watering even before you learn that the sisters are only 20 and 17 years old.

If their taut, tinderbox energy seems to scream with a frenetic need to maximise their every second, then there is a reason for that. In late 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Nyrobi was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, leaving her constantly tired and in acute pain. For the first year of her illness, she found herself drifting in and out of unreplenishing sleep for up to 22 hours a day. Amid a distressing time, the one salvation proved to be an online music course suggested to her by her mother. Attending twice a week alongside Chaya, it offered Nyrobi a focal point to her new life, a reason to take on the pain and get out of bed. The sisters reconnected in a profound way, drawing inspiration from those fleeting, special hours. Before long, they were writing songs together.

“Without the music, I don’t think I could have done anything,” Nyrobi now reflects. This album is the result of that sentiment, many of its songs drawn from the emotionally conflicted life experience the two were navigating. On ‘Come on Outside’, we hear Chaya sing to her sister: “Come on outside/You’ve gotta live before you die/They don’t know your fight/So they can’t say you didn’t try”. The poignancy resounds all the more pointedly when you learn that simply going into their back garden in a wheelchair was a mission for Nyrobi at the time.

‘Straight To Heart’ is derived from a time when Nyrobi went uninvited to her friend’s 18th birthday party because it was assumed her disability would have made it impossible. Nyrobi speaks of the “loneliness and emptiness” of that feeling. “I most probably wouldn’t have been able to join them but I still wanted to feel considered and asked. That would have meant a lot. Instead it felt like I had been completely forgotten. I’m not just some emotionless drone now that I’m disabled,” she pleads.

For a while, the sisters chose to hide the illness, fearful that the music industry would discriminate against them. But, true to the ALT BLK ERA philosophy, they have seized control of that narrative and are now proud to speak openly about the condition, in the hope that it will allow others to share their own hidden struggles. And woe betide anyone who is thinking about judging them for it.

The triple-hit of ‘Upstairs Neighbours’, ‘Come Fight Me for It’ and ‘Run Rabbit’ on the second half of Rave Immortal is a head-spinning reclamation of their lives, at the expense of no-one. A signal of undefeated resilience, it comes close to capturing the dynamism of their live shows, which, far from being hindered, have in fact been powered by Nyrobi’s diagnosis, her medicated windows of excess made precious and indispensable. Glastonbury and Reading & Leeds audiences can speak to that, and the duo now hold Download firmly in their crosshairs.

ALT BLK ERA’s summer 2023 EP ‘Freak Show’ made immediate waves, earning a rave NME review and an astonishingly early MOBO nomination for Best Alternative Act, sharing a shortlist with the likes of Young Fathers and Arlo Parks.

Raised on a diet of their mother’s reggae and R&B, the sisters found their own musical calling as young teenagers, finding a social shield in the empowering female-led hip-hop of Latto and Princess Nokia, and glorious escapism in the Japanese power metal band Kebyo. They were musical magpies already, even if they had yet to find a space to call their own.

“I think I’d actually have been quite frightened by the kind of music I’m making today when I was 12,” Nyrobi says, with a glint. “I think I’d be a bit scared. But now we can’t wait to force feed it down everyone’s internet throats.”

A blizzard of late-night writing sessions after the EP’s release saw them home in on their destined sound, their instincts strong enough – just about – to control the lifeforce that was now cascading out of them.

The album’s ten bangers-in-waiting came to life during a whirlwind six-day recording session overseen by Natt Webb at RatCat Studios (The Struts, King Blonde) in January 2024, a symbiotic artist-producer connection that circumvented the need for long, aimless conversations – the two parties immediately just got it.

The delirious headiness of the final album’s freewheeling sonic aesthetic is a testament to ALT BLK ERA’s post-genre freedom, but where the record does have more concrete foundations is in its narrative structure.

The aforementioned vulnerability of ‘Straight to Heart’ and ‘Come on Outside’ serves as the opening act, the songs’ achingly relatable evocations of universal human experiences – alienation, anxiety, low self-esteem – offering an olive branch to the listener.

As the album progresses with ‘Crashing Parties’, though, and our heroes “kick down your door, break through your wall and jump through your floor”, ALT BLK ERA seize those introspections and make them superpowerful. Through ‘Come Fight Me for It’ and ‘Run Rabbit’, the sisters are forcibly throwing down the bonds of social norms, and imploring the listener to do the same.

By the numinous ‘Catch Me If You Can’, their “insatiable hunger” is careening out of control, a formidable new regeneration of the sisters developing before our ears. And then, the glorious climax of the album’s title track, where they have rejected a “life of toil” and taken the quantum leap “through the portal” to arrive finally at an everlasting, mythical superbeing; their metamorphosis complete, transcendence activated, Rave Immortality achieved.