Album review: Mimi Barks – Dreamstate Of Fear

Magic or voodoo? It’s hard to tell with Mimi Barks. The German-born artist isn’t just an innovator, she’s utterly resolute in her dedication to the weird and wondrous.

“I find beauty in the obscene. I don't think it's horrible,” she told K! in 2024, shortly after the release of debut album proper THIS IS DOOM TRAP. It’s that divinely deviant interest in the macabre, in life’s extreme contrasts, that makes her music so fascinating.

This finds her opening new pages. Dreamstate Of Hell, written after her move to Los Angeles, is a delicious, jarring collusion of rock, pop and metal shot through with daring undercurrents of electronics. It’s the perfect palette for Mimi to paint visions of Heaven and Hell, not in a dreamy afterlife sense, but in a more full-frontal vision of what’s happening right now. Beyond that, it’s just a great song that drags you back into her strange world.

While the words 'Mimi' and 'mainstream' ain’t gonna be used together very often, Ophelia is the nearest she’s got to an accessible thrill ride, a frankly beautiful combination of build and release, screams and melody, light and dark. It’s the sort of thing that eternal alt metal flames In This Moment specialise in, proof that there’s no limits.

Jericho is more epic, but it’s beautifully restrained, a mashing of genuine emotion with wired electronics. Like Ophelia it comes with a small thermonuclear bomb of a hook, putting you in mind of the glossy pop metal that innovative Brighton duo Lake Malice are doing so well at present.

Then we go full trap, or rap-rock, with Power durch Verrat (power through betrayal). Performed in German, it’s loaded with insistent, pulsing beats and defiant shout-outs. From there it turns tail again, caressing you with the comparatively controlled Butterfly In Chains. 'I love the way you make me sick,' she emotes, again delighting not just in combining ill-matched bedfellows, but making some magic out of it.

Oddly, despite its length, Mimi says this is an in-between albums thing. But that just leaves you wondering what’s next. If that happens to be anything like this, we – and Mimi Barks – have much to look forward to.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Nine Inch Nails, WARGASM, Enter Shikari

Dreamstate Of Fear is out now via DEATHKISS