Though Drowned By Locals gives the impression of being an industrial noise label, with graphics full of razorblades, their output is more eclectic than that. The Amman based label serves weirdness of all kinds and geographies, spanning provocative punk pastiche by DIY legend Jean-Louis Costes to industrial techno by Richie Culver, to anti-colonial power electronic by HULUBALANG and apocalyptic dancehall of firstlin3. Drowned By Locals have recently celebrated five years of existence, in which they’ve stirred the waters of global underground.

Before founding Drowned By Local under a military curfew during the pandemic, the label’s curator, Laith Demashqieh, had been organising shows in Amman, bringing in artists like Drew McDowell and Hiro Kone, but he grew tired of being afraid of crackdowns and moral panics. “Drowned By Locals reflects a feeling of suffocation by proximity – by social pressure, familiarity, and consensus, as well as a general scepticism toward authority,” Demashqieh explains of the label’s name. Today is label operated from Jordan with nodes in the Netherlands and distributed with the help of befriended labels such as Industrial Coast. Drowned By Locals’ mission is, according to their motto, to give “voice and face to the marginalised brutes, misfits, savages but delicate at heart.” Demashqieh elaborates: “I like to avoid the term ‘outsider artist’ and prefer the term ‘su’luk’ instead – the pre-Islamic Arabian poet cast out of their tribe, living on the margins and turning exile into authorship.”

Costes
“bedouin rock”
From Bad Trip In Petra (2020)

The first release on Drowned By Locals came about as a coincidence. Demashqieh was preparing a radio show and asked French DIY provocateur Jean-Louis Costes for some music, giving him complete freedom. What he received was a 90 minute, 19 track conceptual work which Costes described as the story of a naïve French tourist’s imagined trip to Jordan. Bad Trip In Petra is a punk-ish stand-up patchwork of spoken word and samples of stereotypical Arab melodies but mainly parodying Costes’ French native’s Western gaze.

Cheb Terro vs Dj Die Soon
“Underplanet”
From CHEB TERRO VS DJ DIE SOON (2022)

Although Drowned by Locals is not bound by territorial boundaries, it counts several local or regional artists on its books, whether the Jordanian producer DJ Gawad or Tunisian MC Cheb Terro. The latter was among the first artists to find common ground with the label, and his music has now been released posthumously. Cheb Terro and Demashqieh developed a close friendship over long video calls while working on the record, which is powered by abrasive beats by DJ Die Soon. “During that period, he was preoccupied with death; it ran through the lyrics across the album, including a track titled “Underplanet”, which referred to a kind of parallel realm he often spoke about.”

firstlin3 & signal 0
“got a friend at last / codeine (feat adios adios)”
From ⛧PARANOIA STAR⛧ (2023)

⛧PARANOIA STAR⛧ sounds like a millennial panic attack, with feverish and eclectic productions, but adds considerable dose of saccharine to the Drowned By Locals catalogue. Madrid producer firstlin3 assembled collaborators from Spain, Portugal, Egypt, and the UK and overdosed their vocals with Auto-Tune across 13 tracks, which mesh melancholic hedonism of dancehall with happy hardcore and cloudrap. But some tracks carry the sense of paranoia, like “got a friend at last / codeine” with its oversaturated vocals. Firstlin3 describes the mixtape as “a spell, a joke and a fucking earthquake tearing through the doomed megalopolis”.

HULUBALANG
“Cerca”
From Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal (2023)

The thread of resistance against colonisers runs through their log. Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal by Hulubulang, which is a side project of Kasimyn from Gabber Modus Operandi, is a perfect example. The album’s title roughly translates as “synthetic feeling for anonymous sacrifices” and is inspired by documents of Dutch colonial rule unearthed from Indonesian war archives. It sounds like power electronics turned into desolate club music, with rhythm patterns drawn from traditional Indonesian music. But these tracks carry the historical baggage, as in “Cerca” haunted by suffocated screams buried under ballistic snares.

Quiet Husband
“Subutex”
From Religious Equipment (2024)

Hull born multimedia artist Richie Culver, according to Drowned by Locals’ curator, is “an archetype of the perfect DBL comrade”. Culver’s collaboration with the Amman based label began with the release of his 2023 album Alive In The Living Room, a claustrophobic noise album inspired by his lifelong struggle with sleep paralysis. 2024’s Religious Equipment under the Quiet Husband moniker, which is a stomping industrial techno record, was appropriately described by Misha Farrant (The Wire 497) as a record that “wouldn’t be out of place on the soundtrack of Harmony Korine’s Gummo.”

Saint Abdullah & Eomac
“Overexposure will kill a pornstar”
From Light meteors crashing around you will not confuse you (2024)

Saint Abdullah, Iranian-Canadian siblings Mohammed and Mehdi Mehrabani-Yeganeh, and Irish producer Ian McDonnel, aka Eomac, recorded their album during the first weeks of streamed genocide in Gaza. Light meteors crashing around you will not confuse you is assembled from Iranian revolutionary chants, samples of Islamic melodies, blitzes of noise, and rusty hiphop beats that sound like Muslimgauze landing a release on Stones Throw. In tracks like “Overexposure will kill a pornstar”, samples are mutated to the extreme, with an effect bordering on psychic warfare.

Kinlaw & Franco Franco
“Crocs on the plough”
From Faith Elsewhere (2025)

Disciples of Bristol’s Avon Terror Corps, who include producer Kinlaw, MC Franco Franco or vocalist Dali de Saint Paul, have become constants in the DBL’s catalogue and regularly feature on each other’s records. The follow up to Kinlaw’s hard-hitting 2023 album WELD, Faith Elsewhere is a joint record with MC Franco Franco (as profiled in The Wire 501): it paints a techno-feudalist picture of the near future and wrestles with surveillance capitalism. It switches between industrial rap and melancholic mode, as in “Crocs on the plough”, where Franco’s crooning rap in Italian is paired with Kinlaw’s hydraulic-metallic beat.

Otro
“The Star”
From Peanut Ballads For A Lone Star (2026)

Otro is a shapeshifting project of Valencia’s Aaron Morris, whose output ranges from early deconstructed club sounds to ambient to lo-fi guitar. Otro’s collection, Peanut Ballads For A Lone Star, best encapsulates romanticism and “delicateness of heart” of Drowned By Locals. It’s made of once-shelved guitar sketches, somewhere between Spanish folk forms, cosmic americana and hypnagogic pop, originally written for “a cursed film” in one night. “The Star” vaguely echoes Scott Walker in the late 1960s.

Read Miloš Hroch’s full Unlimited Editions column on Drowned By Locals in The Wire 506. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital magazine library.