Mimi Barks’ lair lies in the depths of East London, behind rusted gates and corrugated iron sheets. Glass crunches underfoot as you approach this run-down warehouse. Cautiously wandering into the courtyard, you’re greeted by corroded bike frames and weed-covered abandoned furniture. A half-formed creature made of clay and nestled beside a mound of loose bricks and wood planks completes the last-days-on-Earth vibe.
But look beyond the flaking brickwork, and there’s much more to this apparent hovel. Walls are adorned with neon graffiti, murals inject images of nature into this urban landscape and it’s dotted with sculptures formed from discarded scrap. It’s rough around the edges, sure, but there’s a wild creativity to it. It’s no wonder one of the nu gen scene’s most exciting performers feels at home here.
Mimi shares this place with a group of other creatives. Right now, she’s up on the roof, accessible via a rickety staircase. She’s a vision in leather and chains, gloomy make-up sinking her eyes deep into her skull. Her aura is captivating, if not a little menacing. As we approach, she holds out a black plastic bag and smiles a devilish grin. This is disconcerting. Perhaps it contains a relic from the video shoot for her breakout 2022 single Ashes, such as the murky jar containing a two-headed embryo or some mutated animal taxidermy.
Oh, no, wait. It’s cans of Stella. She just wants a drink. We crack open the booze and plonk ourselves down at a table surrounded by mismatched chairs. She’s just got back from playing a run of European festivals, where she screeched and growled in the faces of unsuspecting audience members, looking like a reanimated corpse. In a few weeks, she will drop her debut album, This Is Doom Trap. ‘Doom trap’ is the name she’s given to her exhilarating collision of carnal hip hop, gnashing metal, industrialised rage and abrasive electronic aggro.
“I christened my music ‘doom trap’ as I feel it stands alone in its own universe of dread and despair,” she explains. “It’s more in-depth and self-reflective than trap, almost evoking a sense of impending doom through its dark and heavy atmosphere.”
As we talk, her ring-adorned fingers clutch her can of lager like it contains an elixir of life, and the grills on her teeth glint in the daylight. But the chains, talons and gothic-creature-from-your-nightmares fashion sense is deceptive. She speaks slowly and thoughtfully, but warmly. She’s been knee-deep in the grime and dirt and exudes a seen-it-all vibe, but then she will break into a big grin as she talks, like a little kid.
She has medicine in her purse for the local foxes – maybe she identifies with creatures that, in this city at least, are often seen as vermin. The look, the foxes, this compound – Mimi Barks seems to find a weird kind of beauty where others don’t. She takes in the warehouse and courtyard below us like it’s a beautiful but decaying palace at the heart of her burgeoning empire.
“This place, it’s romantic, in a way,” she explains, wistfully. “It’s entirely unpretentious. I hate when a place is too nice.”
If you ask Mimi Barks where she’s from, you won’t get a straightforward answer. Officially, the umbilical cord was severed in a small town in West Germany. Mimi herself insists otherwise. In her view, she’s been born time and time again, perpetually slinking out of one flesh suit and worming her way into another. That twisted video for her single, Abyss, captured one such rebirth.
Mimi’s bloodied, naked form is surrounded by goats as she rolls in offal and squirms along a forest floor like a Satanic ritual dropped in the middle of The Blair Witch Project. Deadgirl, the intense 2022 mixtape on which Abyss appeared, itself marked the end of a dark chapter in her life, a snarling sonic funeral for an era of exhausting self-loathing and a herald of the reinvention that would follow. This fascination with rebirth can be traced back to her turbulent childhood. She came from an unhappy home, and was an outsider at school.
“I was a punk, always dressed up crazy with my massive boots,” she says, the German twang in her voice still discernible. “I got bullied. I just felt very out of place. I was very depressed and I needed an outlet.”
Painting would be her first solace before she turned to music. At the age of 12, she began learning the clarinet, a fact she is amusingly mortified to admit today. By 14, she started playing the guitar, losing herself in grungy noodling. At 17, she even joined a ska band. But the darkness was always there, something damaged and desperate to claw its way out. Mimi’s first major rebirth came when discovered Berlin’s exhilarating, famously hedonistic club scene.
“I was ‘born’ in West Germany, but I was reborn in Berlin,” she says. It was there, amid the throbbing soundsystems and latex-clad debauchery of the club scene, that Mimi began her transformation into the nocturnal creature she is today. “I ended up living a double life,” she smirks slyly. “Being in Berlin every other weekend, then showing up late for work in my hometown. It just got to a point where they were like, ‘Why don’t you just fuck off to Berlin?’”
It was the encouragement Mimi needed. She moved into a squat in the German capital, sharing it with 10 punk guys. She quickly adjusted to the lifestyle. Working at a bar/gig venue/tattoo parlour called White Trash, she got to mingle with DJs, watch substances get snorted off mirrored tables, and even get a new tatt if she fancied getting inked on shift.
Clubbing became her life. If a shift at White Trash started at midnight on Friday, by the time she finished it at midday on Saturday she’d already be buzzing from alcohol, courtesy of generous customers keeping her fuelled. Finishing her shift drunk was never a problem. “You just stay out until your next shift,” she says, laughing.
There’s no faulting her logic. Berlin’s nightlife is embodied by iconic nightclub Berghain. Housed in a brutalist former power plant in the old East Germany, this legendary techno Mecca and den of debauchery remains a magnet for clubbers the world over. For Mimi, its lure is almost religious.
“Berghain is freedom,” she says. When you go on a Sunday, it’s like Sunday service. You go in and forget about everything. And I’m not talking about drugs – I’ll go there sober, drink water. It’s the music that gets you high. It’s total freedom.”
There’s a sparkle in her eye today when she talks about the city’s nightlife. She recalls seeing overhead nude acrobats and people willingly being pissed on in clubs, and explains why you should never take a dip in the pool in fetish pit the KitKatClub. It sounds like chaos, but she makes it sound like magic. Every anecdote is closed off with a single, repeating statement: “It’s beautiful.”
When we mention we’ve never been to Berlin, Mimi is almost insulted. “We should have gone!” she howls. “London is nothing - it’s vanilla in comparison.”
This Is Doom Trap is a product of Mimi’s time on the Berlin club scene. It maybe be gnarled and confrontational, but it draws on the same sense of personal expression and undiluted emotion that defined that period of her life. For now, though, Berlin is behind her. She left the city and moved to London in 2020. “I was fed up,” she says. “The German music industry is three years behind the UK.”
German managers and labels tried to squeeze Mimi into a box – a coffin confining her creativity. By contrast, the UK loves a tortured artist. She settled into London quickly among the couch-surfing nomads desperate to express themselves, and started to brew the strain of music that would mutate into ‘doom trap’. A UK-based manager, whom she doesn’t name, was the first to see her potential, hence the move.
“We connected and he was working with some dope producers and artists. He was very supportive of the vision, he always let me do what I wanted to do, without any questions. He always loved what I made - up to a point where I didn’t even realise he’d posted my first EP online…”
That EP, 2020’s Enter The Void, flung Mimi out into the world. She was pissed, but she acknowledges now it was the right decision. “We struck at the right time,” she says. The forced drop was strangely liberating for her too. “As a musician, it can be a long journey to learn to let go of your art,” she says. “So it was a blessing and curse.”
Unfortunately, the relationship with her manager turned sour. Montana, a track from This Is Doom Trap featuring Yeti Bones from punk-rap provocateurs Ho99o9, was inspired by the fallout. It’s a howl of venomous, guttural fury. “It’s just pure, ‘Fuck you! I’m my own boss! I’ll show you!’” she howls now. “It teaches people that, if you’ve done it once, you can always start again. You have the power to do that. And that is true empowerment.”
Mimi is hoping to empower her fans to seek out their own rebirth. This Is Doom Trap encourages people to eradicate their “pain-body” (the ‘ego’ in psychoanalytical terms), something Mimi believes will help them. “The pain-body gains power through self-pity,” Mimi explains. “It feeds off of our suffering. We’re all born with it, and we need to let it go, live in the moment.”
As we sip on our Stellas, Mimi says she’s got itchy feet. It’s time to move on from London, just like she moved on from Berlin. “I’m waiting for my US visa,” she explains. Another country, another rebirth. “It’s this urge. I just need constant stimulation, new challenges. I don’t like getting comfortable. It’s almost like being addicted to the pain of having to recreate everything from scratch.”
She laughs to herself as she quotes her own track, FSU: ‘I’m in love with my broken heart, build shit up then I fuck it up.’ It makes sense. Mimi’s constant desire for change lies within the simple fact that stability offends her, makes her skin crawl.
“Nothing good comes out of feeling comfortable,” she says. “You can only progress when you’re uncomfortable and taking chances. Otherwise, you just do the same shit all over again. I’m also quite nihilistic in general. I’m not really shocked by many things. So I kind of chase that intensity.”
She starts to say there’s something “romantic” about personal pain, then stops herself. “I’m trying not to romanticise my pain, my depression,” she frowns. She will never do ‘happy’. The empowerment that This Is Doom Trap offers is as close as she’ll get. Still, you can take Mimi out of the debauchery of Berlin, but you can’t take the debauchery out of Mimi Barks. “I want people to have sex in the moshpit,” she says. “I want at least two babies from this record.”
She describes her dream family tree: two grotty moshers with a depressed baby, conceived during anti-depressant anthem Mirtazapine. While Mimi aims to spark a horny doom trap revolution with her music, she’s also trying to heed her own message to live in the moment. Considering she’s already thinking about the US move, she’s not doing a great job. There’s always the option of going back to Berlin.
She laughs at the suggestion, tooth grills glinting in the sunshine, like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard. “There’s no way back,” she grins. “Only forward.”
This Is Doom Trap is out now via Silent Cult. Mimi Barks tours the UK in October.
