“What’s the point if it’s not fun? If you want to be serious, don’t do fucking pop music. Grab a fucking acoustic guitar, babe.” Those words from London-based producer and singer Lynks are a call to arms, and nobody could accuse him of failing to rise to his own challenge. His world is a reminder of why pop music has been the enduring art form of the last half-century; all sex, wit, theatricality, and heightened emotional anxiety, delivered by an anonymous artist wearing a gimp mask. On ABOMINATION, his brand of hyperactive electropop meets anarchic punk and hard club music at the crossroads on tracks like “Use It Or Lose It” and “(What Did You Expect From) Sex With a Stranger,” with lyrics that relay astonishingly frank tales of the trials and travails of Lynks’s love life.
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The character of “Lynks” has been in development since its debut in 2018 under the name Lynks Afrikka. The drag-inspired camp of their visuals has been slowly dialed up over time, and the songs have grown to become celebratory stories about London’s queer club scene. With ABOMINATION, there is a sense of the character’s culmination, cramming several years in the life of a young adult into 45 chaotic minutes.
Lynks swings wildly from shame to ecstasy on ABOMINATION, but always with bulletproof confidence. Speaking to the man behind the mask—who prefers to remain anonymous—over Zoom from his South London home, it becomes clear that the character stemmed from a place of insecurity. “It was a time when I was obviously still out and gay, but I was very, very preoccupied with not drawing too much attention to myself and not being seen as too gay,” he says. “Lynks is the liberation of that. Having my face covered allows me to really play into a deep queerness. I started to play up a hyper-feminine side to my character, and people liked what I was doing a lot more. That was how I managed to figure out that acting the way that everyone expects you to act as you go through life is fine—even good. But if you be yourself, that’s more beautiful.”
Invoking the spirit of a popular Oscar Wilde quote—”Give a man a mask, and he will tell you his truth”—Lynks rotates his masks regularly; sometimes he goes for BDSM leather, other times highly tailored fabric. The disguises aren’t just muses, they’re portals—a mechanism through which to express himself completely, something he had previously been struggling to achieve for several years. As a teenager, he had been drawn to music and performance, but still felt the pressure to conform. “You end up making the music that everyone around you thinks is cool,” he recalls. “When I first started, it was that time when every 15- and 16-year-old was just trying to sound like Disclosure, so that was my gateway. I was the biggest Disclosure ripoff you’ve ever heard in your life.” Over time, his sound morphed into what he describes as “sadboy James Blake,” craving authenticity but being tortured by earnestness. Seeking guidance, he turned to his earliest musical loves for inspiration.
“My musical epiphany was M.I.A.; she is my GOAT—my first deep dive into the back catalog of a freaky artist. She’s a fucking genius, [Arular] is still definitely my favorite dance music album ever,” he says. “And then I got into Peaches, and the attitude of that version of punk. I’d been put off punk by the rigidity of it, but it was cool to see someone that was so authentically punk, but not by playing the same fucking two chords on a guitar. She was punk in a very relatable way, and it made me feel like, ‘I want to do that.’”
That revelation proved to be the launchpad for Lynks—a coming-out party for the parts of his identity that he’d previously felt the need to conceal. A persona was born, one that stood in opposition to the strictures of the music scenes that surrounded him. By exploring the outer reaches of what pop could be, he came to realize that he, too, was embodying the punk mindset.
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“When you’re as theatrical and out there as I am, you definitely get a lot of raised eyebrows,” he says. “People look at you like you’re not really welcome in these spaces. And I’m like, ‘If you actually believed in the punk ethos that you claim to, you would be like, ‘Here is someone pushing the boundaries of what you can do at a punk gig.’”
Lynks achieved early viral success in 2020 with a frantic cover of Courtney Barnett’s “Pedestrian at Best,” while establishing his reputation on the underground club circuit with a series of witty, DIY electropop singles, collected on volumes 1 and 2 of the Smash Hits EPs.
Abomination is entirely self-produced, and retains a lot of the early material’s homespun charm. But there is a swagger to the beatmaking now that matches the album’s subject matter. “CPR,” for example, boasts clattering, industrial synths, while Lynks indulges in typically licentious roleplay (“Put your hands on my chest, make it convex, make my eyes roll back like I’m possessed”).
Lynks is capable of sweet vulnerability, too; witness the cute love letter that is “Tennis Song,” a track he wrote while distracted during a tennis game with friends. But he recoils from the idea that the album should be seen as a realistic summary of queer life in 2024. “I don’t really want heartfelt love albums,” he says, “I want tongue-in-cheek love albums. That’s probably something I should deal with in therapy.” He does, however, lament the fact that Western culture has been so ineffective at depicting a world in which being young, queer, and horny is valid.
“I’m very, very conscious of never having a model of what a happy, queer life looks like in TV or film,” he says. “And growing up, [TV and film is] how we learned what our life might look like. And there was no blueprint. And that’s scary, because you essentially have to do all the hard work yourself. What do I actually want from my life? If I can’t have a wife and two-and-a-half kids, then what?”
The sense of urgency that courses through Abomination was heightened by the fact that the album was lost just as it first neared completion. After an intense three-month period of recording, Lynks left for Glastonbury Festival 2022. Returning home, he found his laptop had been stolen—with none of the music backed up. “It was the worst day ever,” he reflects. That he believes the crisis led to the album being “significantly better” as a result feels like a reflection of his newfound confidence.
Now, with his first album under his belt, Lynks is already considering how he might further develop the character. “It’s very likely that I might look a bit different or have a different point of view after Abomination is over,” he hints. Whatever the future holds, expect that the man behind Lynks will fill it with color and provocation—and a healthy irreverence for what has gone before.
