Bladee Talks Ego Death on Sulfer Surfer

May 22. i-D runs a Bladee interview. The album is Sulfer Surfer. The misspelling is intentional.

Reichwald spends the piece circling the same question: what does it mean to make music when the self dissolves? The album title, he says, comes from a dream. A surfer riding sulfur instead of water. The image stuck. He built the record around it.

The sound

Production leans cleaner than his last two projects. Less distortion, more melody. The beats come from Whitearmor and Mechatok, longtime collaborators. One track samples a field recording from a Swedish forest. Another uses a synth patch Reichwald found in a folder labeled "2018 ideas." He spent three years not touching it.

The lyrical register is where the ego-death thread runs. "I don't need to be anything," he says in the interview. "I just need to be here." That line shows up twice on the record, once reversed. The repetition is the point. The reversal too.

The release

Out now. No rollout, no singles, just the full album on streaming. Reichwald posted the cover art to his Instagram three hours before release. A sulfur-yellow square. No text. The comments filled with flame emojis and question marks. No clarification from him.

The i-D piece is the first interview he's given since 2023. He talks about meditation, about sitting with silence, about making music that doesn't need him to exist. Then he says he had fun making it. The contradiction is the thesis.