BAKSH Finds Strength Through Vulnerability on “Unalive”

“Unalive” by BAKSH isn’t subtle, and that’s exactly why it works. The track doesn’t try to package pain into something digestible or inspirational. It’s chaotic, heavy, and emotionally honest in a way that almost feels invasive at times. Listening to it feels less like hearing a polished single and more like overhearing a conversation not meant for you.

At its core, the song plays out like an argument within himself. Multiple versions of BAKSH collide instead of forming one clean narrative. Anxiety pulls one direction, distraction pulls another, while something deeper sits underneath both. Rather than forcing clarity onto the emotion, he lets the tension exist in real time.

Sonically, “Unalive” leans cinematic without abandoning its hip-hop foundation. The production feels spacious yet constantly on edge, like it’s holding something back the entire track. Piano melodies drift in and out, creating an eerie calm, while BAKSH’s vocal delivery cuts through with urgency. He doesn’t sound like he’s performing emotions. He sounds like he’s actively processing them while the song unfolds.

That’s what separates “Unalive” from the wave of overly curated “mental health rap” dominating social media right now. This doesn’t feel manufactured for relatability. It’s messy, contradictory, uncomfortable, and deeply human.

The song also ties into BAKSH’s larger “Tripolar” concept, where identity is split across multiple internal dimensions. It sounds abstract on paper, but the way he translates it emotionally is what makes it land. You don’t need to fully understand the philosophy to feel the conflict running through the track.

The accompanying visuals push that idea even further, using division and fragmentation as metaphors for losing yourself and the people around you. Thankfully, it never turns preachy. It simply presents the emotional consequence and lets the weight of it sit there.

What makes “Unalive” hit hardest is knowing it came from a real breaking point. You can hear that reality baked into every line and every pause. There’s no distance between the artist and the emotion. “Unalive” may not be an easy replay, but it’s incredibly difficult to forget. Honestly, to us, that matters more.

You let different versions of yourself clash openly on this track. Was there ever a moment when you considered simplifying that narrative for the listener?

I didn’t wish to simplify the narrative for the listener, instead I chose to believe in the audience to be intelligent, intuitive and expressive themselves (not to mention dramatic). Humans have layers, and some of those layers are primal.

Music often inspires that layer of people who are primal, who respond to emotions when they listen to music about themes such as laugh, cry, love, sex, fight, fail, persevere, dance, abolish, demolish, jealousy, greed, etc. Problem is that the marketing of music is segmented by demographics, and if the music constantly only appeals to one layer of their primal instinct, and they “simplify the narrative” to do this effectively, the audience becomes less diverse and sadly also less accepting of music that speaks on wider topics, eventually leading to their communities exiling members for talking about specific topics in real life.

As an artist, I chose to speak my mind freely, as I don’t write my lyrics; I produce a beat for the feeling, and then I record into a mic line by line if I must, therefore my language is more spoken word than written rap sometimes, which makes it digestible to the audience, however my themes will always be multi-layered, like humans.

The idea of “Tripolar” reframes how people think about identity. What’s one misconception about mental health that you think this project directly challenges?

The misconception this directly challenges is the label of illness on people who have constant polar opposite thoughts, feelings, and reactions, or those who “talk to themselves”; it instead suggests self-consultancy and giving room for both sides to exist, which is a far healthier and more realistic outcome than trying to feel just one of them. Every human is multipolar, which means they can feel different things, be different people (some people do things online they would NEVER do in real life, but part of their nature exists there). The goal is to understand our two selves and be the third self to keep ourselves in check.

The way it happens is through self-awareness. I was clinically diagnosed with anxiety and adhd, but now I know that one side is the depression that sees the world and my own traumas and things I can’t control and breaks, then the 3. 4. adhd kicks in to be like “nah man don’t look at that look at these things that are cool infront of us right now”…granted when I do focus on those cool things infant of me like music, I get distracted every 20 seconds with random thoughts running up and down the stairs haha; but the point is they both work in tandem to protect me, one tells me threat that is very real, and one tells me diversion strategy, and if I can let both sides exist, the side that choses to balance both becomes the new boss; the third side only wants balance. The idea is to accept yourself, don’t be one thing over the other, be both, and understand both.

You blend cinematic elements with raw hip-hop delivery. What’s one production choice that made the song feel more real instead of more polished?

One production choice was mixing the final version of the song in surround sound instead of stereo through Dolby Atmos. Music is designed for stereo left and right, but a lot of new equipment is being coded to handle Spatial Audio. And as for me personally, the sounds of the real world are happening spherically around me, so to capture the essence of sound in the natural world in music means, every word every drum line every bass line has an impact that feels like you’re inside the song, not listening to it…the lyrics doesn’t sound like your’e hearing them, it sounds like you’re speaking them, from the stomach. And as a mixing engineer, the final version in surround, the right way, gives a lot of room, so the distortions that may happen in stereo will not happen in surround mixes.

There’s a fine line between honesty and overwhelming the listener. How do you decide how far to push before it becomes too much?

There’s a fine line between honesty and overwhelming the listener. How do you decide how far to push before it becomes too much? This is a real problem. I have tried to control this force before, but it doesn’t work too well for me. I am usually at an emotional point of overwhelm; therefore, the people who listen to me and understand usually come from that place of being overwhelmed as it is. Now, for capturing a new audience, with these themes alone, I have had multiple reviews about my songs, making them feel dreadful. It wasn’t the intention, however, as an artist, I can only make people feel what they feel may be personal to them. I am trusting the audience to decide what they like and skip over what they don’t, rather than forcefully supporting an artist because everyone tells them to, while making millions talking about how they’re so much better than everyone.

A lot of mainstream artists use that theme, to create favouritism amongst audience and move chart metrics by creating competition, but when rappers say I am better than “YOU” in a song they’re probably thinking about one competing artist in their head…but the listener takes it as, Oh he is better than me I guess, which causes the bully syndrome, where they find someone else to make em feel that way. I don’t do that in my music. It has been carefully crafted to make people hopeful and inclusive, while also showing them healthy expressions of fire and darkness…so if I, as an artist, can exist in the music space, then I am grateful because it’s not about me; it will show that art, artists, and audiences have evolved. I don’t want or need the credit nor the blame, to inspire nor overwhelm.

Thematically, my music may have depth, but to make it easy for the listener, I make it melodic and musical, with tones and words to inspire, but also, I reduce frequencies I have researched, such as 250Hz and 111Hz, linearly, as I have primarily tested them to cause anxiety within the self. Usually, a lot of music causes aggression due to spikes in these low frequencies, which become prevalent during concerts, so if some songs rile the crowd up too much, it may be someone messing with frequencies that are harmful. I believe in ethics, I'll tell dark stories, my life was dark AF, but I learned to live and love and create through the darkness, and that is what I intend to project to the audience; not just trauma, but healing.

When someone hears this song at their lowest point, what do you want it to interrupt in their thinking right then?

At someone’s lowest, the problem is they feel alone, exiled, and isolated. From personal experience these are the thoughts that come to mind If I died, others life would be better Non existence would be better than living in this cycle When I’m gone they will realize what they lost / When I’m gone everyone that knows me will move on My debts will be forgiven if I die (this is dangerous due to binding impulse to logic) I want it to directly interrupt their thoughts of wanting to unalive themselves from the title and know they’re not alone.

Then from the first line of the song, “Is it god or is science the truth? I do not look for the proof, I rather believe in real s*** like the systematic destruction of youth. which actually absolves them, saying a lot of the things you’re feeling are due to systemic socio-economic failures that the youth invading you from a younger you have been put through.

THEN, the second line is supposed to bring those two parts of themselves that are divided between the nouns “life” or “death” together, and translate the language into a verb for “live” and “die”…the line is as follows “I might wanna die, but I don’t wanna kill, sometimes I’m divided by two”…translating the nouns of life/death to the verb of live/die creates space for Action based thought, which tells them they have the control and choice over their actions, returning the power to them.

The goal is to interrupt the pattern that is mentally draining, feeling bad for themselves and about themselves, and instead help them to understand that even if someone else did this to provoke us, the choice to act on being provoked is on us; so if we can understand that we didn’t cause the problem yet we ARE part of the problem…it makes us immediately part of the solution. My hope is that this will return the power to the listener, who may have had it taken away from them by some other force.