It’s 6pm on a Tuesday, and Alt Blk Era are snowed in. Yet the sisters – 20-year-old Nyrobi and 17-year-old Chaya Beckett-Messam – are unfazed by the inches stacking up outside their home in West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire.
“We don’t really have a typical life outside of music. We’re not at the clubs or hanging out,” Nyrobi explains via Zoom, of why they’re so at ease tonight. “We’re very much inside working nonstop.”
For such young musicians, their attitude is switched on and ambitious, and it’s paid off. What began as a playful lockdown project has snowballed into a career, with the nu gen duo signed to prestigious label Earache Records. Combining metal, drum’n’bass and dance with a playful monochrome gothic Harajuku aesthetic, they’ve become the most exciting new band on the alternative scene.
In 2023, Alt Blk Era were nominated for Best Alternative Act at the MOBO Awards, and they’re now in the running again. They also bagged a Best UK Breakthrough Artist nomination at 2024’s Heavy Music Awards. Over the past two years, they’ve played Download, 2000trees, Reading & Leeds and Glastonbury. Now poised to release their debut album, Rave Immortal, Alt Blk Era are on the cusp of their biggest year yet.
Its lead-off single, My Drummer’s Girlfriend, has amassed 1.2 million streams on Spotify, and they recently released a version with Wheatus – just one of many artists who have expressed support for the band.
“We’ve had some big names. Wheatus is a huge one, following our collaboration with them, which is absolutely insane,” Nyrobi recalls in disbelief. “We’ve had Maxim from The Prodigy, who was a huge inspiration for us. Lzzy Hale from Halestorm. The guys from Skindred, Scene Queen and Princess Nokia.”
The sisters started the band in 2020, when they were both teenagers. Taking to YouTube under the name ‘Nyrxbi & Chxy’, they uploaded covers of Bruno Mars, Lorde, Rihanna and more. As the pair found their groove while being homeschooled, they realised they had a decision to make: what was Alt Blk Era going to become? They weren’t satisfied with being a local band dropping their own versions of existing songs – they wanted to make originals.
“We started doing online courses by Inspire Youth Arts, who had this programme during lockdown. They did a course for songwriters and we got invited to do a performance,” Nyrobi explains, framed in low light and wearing a black Rave Immortal hoodie. “They signed us to an interim label which is 100% artist-friendly, and it’s where they helped us fund music videos and studio time.”
In 2022, the sisters released their dark trap-rock debut single, Slowly Die: Solar. Today, the song has nearly 50,000 streams on Spotify. “It was doing pretty well in the first year of it coming out, so we decided to continue,” Chaya explains, also clad in a black hoodie, hers featuring a gothy grey spider-web pattern.
The duo are easygoing, riffing off one another without a second thought. Nyrobi takes the lead, but regularly brings her younger sister into the conversation. Their lives are aligned, too; they binge seasons of K-drama thrillers and Chinese dramas, and occasionally bicker over chores. Their shared interests have also shaped the band’s image, with Nyrobi likening their black-and-white Harajuku gothic look to characters from kids’ TV cartoon Johnny Test, which is about a boy who plays the test subject for his genius twin sisters’ experiments.
“The show has these secret agents called Mr. Black and Mr. White, but the Black one’s called Mr. White and the white one Mr. Black – that’s like us,” she laughs, “It’s Yin and Yang – opposites attract.”
Even before taking online courses during the pandemic, the pair began to learn their craft at the Community Recording Studio (CRS), a long-established charity space in St. Anns, east of Nottingham city centre. It was a supportive environment where they could experiment and express themselves.
“We started going when I was 10 and Chay was 7, because my mum knew [Chief Executive Officer] Trevor Rose, who runs it. I learned guitar, drums and bass. It was a place where nothing was restricted,” Nyrobi smiles. “In primary school I did piano lessons, but it was really music theory based. Also, I wanted to play the songs I liked. So, with CRS, I know how to play the piano, but don’t put no notes in front of me – we can’t read music! Just give me a minute to figure it out and we’ll get there. It wasn’t a traditional playing style, but it allowed us to play around. It was really free-spirited!”
Despite the fact Nottingham has a thriving alternative scene and is bursting with historic venues, from the iconic Rock City to the Rescue Rooms and the Bodega, the sisters weren’t aware of it back then. Raised on pop and neo soul, their touchpoints were Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Lauryn Hill and Whycliffe.
Once they’d written some songs, they started visiting shops such as Void – which is stuffed full of band merchandise, stripy socks and gothic jewellery – and Rough Trade, and asking them what kind of music it was.
“I only listened to radio music growing up and I heard what my mum was playing, which was old-school neo soul, and that was the kind of music we were both exposed to,” Nyrobi recalls. “I would have been well confused if you’d have told me about rock music or alternative back then!”
Aside from being hard workers, the other reason Alt Blk Era are homebodies is because Nyrobi has chronic fatigue syndrome, which means she struggles with constant exhaustion alongside pain and brain fog. She was diagnosed during the pandemic, meaning that the sisters have spent a long time inside their own world, without much outside influence.
“I’m not actually able to go out much. We were doing our own style of alt music and, when we started, we didn’t know what we created. We didn’t listen to alternative music and we weren’t in the scene,” Nyrobi explains. “My disability restricted me so much. The only time I went out of the house was when we had a show.”
Nyrobi’s experiences of living with a hidden disability are expressed on Alt Blk Era’s new album, Rave Immortal. The drum’n’bass-inflected Straight To Heart documents the pain of losing her friendship group (‘Stay please, my friends have all withdrawn’), while the grunge-lite Come On Outside highlights her sister’s support and offers hope to others. (‘Don’t you fight the battles by yourself, you’re not supposed to’). The title itself is a statement of empowerment.
“I’m very proud of the album title, I love it. Everyone should applaud me in the streets and say it’s such a good title,” smiles Nyrobi. “I’m really proud of it because it’s almost ironic – I have chronic fatigue syndrome. It felt unfair, and I felt like Rave Immortal was me growing and transforming into something that was bigger than myself. It’s kind of getting out of my own head and becoming this being that didn’t have constant pain but was larger than life; I got to be immortal doing something that I loved alongside my sister forever.”
Fearful she or the band would face discrimination if she spoke out about her chronic illness, Nyrobi hid it until last summer, when she wrote a blog for mental health charity Young Minds and posted about it on social media. The comments were nothing but supportive.
“It was important to me, as a person, and for thinking about the future of Alt Blk Era, to prove myself, because people neglect disabled people – it’s hard to be disabled in every single industry,” Nyrobi says. “We’re already Black women and we’re already young, and let’s not add disabled to that pile. People have already got enough to say about us in the alternative scene, so I wanted to show that I could do everything that people thought that my disability wouldn’t allow me to.”
Nodding, Chaya adds: “People pity disabled people and say, ‘Oh yeah, they only got that because of diversity and all that, so that’s another reason.’ We wanted to say we got this without people needing to tick off a box.”
Now able to fully express themselves, with a brand new album to tour in Rave Immortal, and backed by famous musicians and a growing fanbase alike, the sisters are ready to embark on a new era. And as for the era after that? Well, they’re already thinking about it…
“Me and Chaya are writing so much and so often. In 2020, I had four albums to go,” Nyrobi admits. “But we’re always writing. If someone said, gun to my head, ‘Give me 10 songs right now’, I’ve got it – I’ll give you 20!”
Rave Immortal is out now via Earache.
