Kinlaw & Franco Franco don’t build albums so much as they conjure worlds. Since a spontaneous freestyle handshake in Avon’s subterranean chambers back in 2018, the duo has been perfecting their own form of sonic alchemy—an “organized mess” where turbulence, humour, and raw devotion fold into one. Their third album, Faith Elsewhere, out via Drowned by Locals on October 3rd, pushes that aesthetic into darker territory: a landscape of cyberpunk prophecy, mediaeval hauntings, and corrosive industrial beats, all filtered through a distinctly theatrical lens.
If their past records staged rituals in backrooms and basements, Faith Elsewhere feels like a cathedral of distortion. Here, Air Loom Gang thrashes with cybernetic trap intensity, Pitstop 2024 teases pop confessional vulnerability, and a revamped Crocs on the Plough resurrects feudal ghosts for the present day. Theirs is music of collision, where narrative doesn’t necessarily match mood, where lyrics function like cryptic hyperlinks, where live energy bleeds into studio recordings with feral immediacy.
Geography shapes their mythos too. Rooted in Bristol’s dystopian grit yet stretched across Amman, Berlin, and beyond, the project thrives only when the two are in the same room: loud, rapid, rapturous. The result is a sound that resists containment: chamber-wave, industrial-trappist, and bardic rap, all at once. Kinlaw & Franco Franco remain unafraid to cut against expectation, embracing intensity as ritual and playfulness as method. With Faith Elsewhere, they summon eleven new sermons for a world already coughing dust, daring listeners to kneel at their altar and lose faith in everything but the noise.
From Avon’s dank chambers to your cross-continental return, how did the 2018 freestyle handshake shape the alchemy that became Kinlaw & Franco Franco?
It was fun to be had, and it turned into a lifelong commitment XD. Those sessions remain very much present in the spirit of our collaboration in the sense that everything we do as KFF is very much in the hands of an organised mess and self-expression!
Faith Elsewhere seems to carry a heavier dose of cyberpunk prophecy and surveillance paranoia. How do the present and future collide in your beatmaking process this time?
Much like the process of assembling the beats, the inspiration spans around three to five thousand years. We enjoy melding sounds, especially when they supplement our general attitude as a bardic rap duo. Nothing is sacred or safe from our chops. Sometimes ideas or samples are pulled from the archives/cellar and stretched and twisted, much like pasta. :’)
Your work often reads like near-biblical performance scripture. How do you translate that theatrical intensity into the studio, particularly on tracks like Air Loom Gang?
When the beat and rap/vocals come together and the song feels like a match, like in the case of Air Loom Gang, minimal aggro beat + sporadic aggro rap. From there, setting the mood most of the time might be just being together in the studio and playing it loud, like at a gig; the more immersed in the music, the more you’ll adjust to it.
A lot of the time, we have played these tunes live many times before we hit the studio, meaning we already have the context of the volume and energy. Since the start, our studio time together has been rapid and rapturous. We really fuck with what each other are doing.
Tracks like Pitstop 2024 and the revival of Crocs on the Plough tread very different sonic landscapes. How do you decide which mood or narrative governs each song?
By default we both bring a very distinct element to the table with respect for each other's craft and playfulness in mind. These might be the main threads leading to tunes like the two you mentioned. They can stand on their own even if not aligned with maybe an expected etiquette. They’re also fun to make and honestly reflect the playful element of the process. The narrative in the lyrics doesn’t necessarily align with the music mood and vice versa.
The press release mentions "crusted sonics, taut future-concrete prangers, and industrial-trappist beats." Can you unpack how these textures are conjured in the lab of Kinlaw & Franco Franco?
Our good friend and exquisite pen Matt Light wrote the press release and came up with these effective wordplays to describe the music. We combine music and words, and so for better or worse the different textures are to be unpacked from the music itself.
Bread rap and butter Gollem birthed from Goram’s phlegm—your imagery is dense and cryptic. How do metaphor and world-building influence the lyrical flow on Faith Elsewhere?
Allegories and imagery evocation are useful to express a state of mind and experience and so on without being literal about it. Writing lyrics allows one to create more layered meaning mediated by the rhymes and tempo. In my opinion that’s part of the craft and what made me passionate about getting involved in the first place. The cryptic elements are there to be deciphered; to catch a reference is a bit like hitting an embedded hyperlink...
With a deepening Bristol/Amman connection, what’s the impact of geography on your sound, and how does cross-continental collaboration feed the album’s energy?
Geography played quite a big part in the construction of this album, due to Franco leaving Bristol for Bremen and now Berlin. Working on things at a distance has never been a KFF thing; we need to be in the same room. I think the majority of the album was done in three sessions in Bristol. The city itself has shaped us since the start, supplying us with all the dystopian medievalism we could desire. I think it was time to remove this vision from the city, mainly releasing on Bristol labels such as Avon Terror Corps/No Corner. Now we offer it to the globe, and what better outlet than Drowned by Locals?
Your audience often leaves shaken, ‘coughing dust for months.’ How do you maintain that sense of ritualistic intensity while evolving your sound over three albums?
The sound evolution went along an organic progression. A lot of the music has been played live before ending up on the albums, especially with Mezzi Umani e Mezze Macchine and this one. The intensity of the music and relative live performance is the matrix of this project.
Industrial, chamber-wave, pop-confessional—your palette is vast. How do you balance experimentation with the expectations of your dedicated congregation of listeners?
There’s a level of useful incommunicability and trust in our collaboration. Music and lyrics come from different timelines in our lives that eventually meet and become songs we put on an album. The expectation of the congregation has never actually crossed our minds in the process. The balance is discovered naturally from experimentation. Sometimes it’s good to cut folks off from the pleasantries to get them to appreciate them more.
Finally, if Faith Elsewhere is your current altar, what would you like listeners to kneel before, and what questions should they be asking themselves after the sermon ends?
Most likely insanity and unhinged dehumanisation have reached your doorstep, kicking it in at 4K resolution. Reasonably, the grasp of reality is completely at a loss, and so is your faith in humanity. Cope, shape your faith and live by it. No thief, soldier, priest nor chosen one will hand you the answer. In this unapologetically violent, intrusive and hopeless infinite present, we might ask ourselves how to not let the machine entirely win our human core on top of everything that has already been taken from us.