maq 22 – MUNINN (2025)
Memory is rarely linear. It fractures, doubles back, distorts, and slips into the subconscious. On MUNINN, rising experimental rapper maq 22 seizes this disjointedness and turns it into a guiding principle. Named after one of Odin’s ravens, embodying memory and mind, the six-track EP is less an exploration of narrative than an excavation of fragments. It is ambitious, often disorienting, but always compelling.
The project is maq 22’s most cohesive artistic statement to date, and a marked evolution from his earlier work. While his 2020 experiments with electronic-driven rap hinted at a fascination with intensity and distortion, MUNINN feels like the culmination of that impulse, refined, intentional, and immersive. Much of the credit goes to Russian producer Tiresss, who produced five of the six tracks. His production is skeletal yet explosive, combining the harsh edges of hardstyle with the glossy fractures of hyper-pop. It’s a world built for contrast: maq 22’s vocals teeter between aggression and fragility, riding beats that sound perpetually on the verge of collapse.
Opener ‘Burn The Sigil’ sets the thematic tone immediately. With its ritualistic overtones, the track blurs the line between spiritual incantation and club-ready anthem. It introduces maq 22 as a performer who is less interested in conventional song structure than in conjuring atmospheres. The EP’s mythology, ravens, ritual, pagan symbolism, serves as more than surface-level aesthetic. maq 22 is acutely aware of the cultural politics surrounding such symbols, explicitly disavowing their far-right appropriation, and instead reframing them as sites of memory, resistance, and personal history.
The EP’s standout moment comes with ‘Europa’, the sole track produced by Hellnah and Pastelfuneral. It’s the project’s most crystalline moment, a track that layers shimmering synths over maq 22’s urgent delivery. The metaphor, Jupiter’s icy moon as a symbol for hidden life, operates on multiple levels, echoing maq 22’s search for identity beneath surfaces both cosmic and internal. The collaboration expands the project’s sonic palette while deepening its thematic scope.
MUNINN often feels like a stream of consciousness, urgent and imperfect in ways that mirror the instability of memory itself. Themes of desire, mental struggle, and existential fear recur, stitched together by vocals that warp and fracture through distortion. The result is unsettling at times, but deliberately so: maq 22 is not offering comfort, but confrontation. The dissonance between personal intimacy and dystopian production is the EP’s defining tension.
In just under 20 minutes, MUNINN manages to feel both expansive and unfinished, in the best way. It reads as a manifesto more than a conclusion, a sketch of where maq 22 is headed. His willingness to stretch genres until they dissolve, to turn myth into metaphor and metaphor into confession, signals an artist less concerned with categorisation than with impact.
Find out more about maq 22 on his Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Spotify.
