Arriving in a tumultuous tornado of gallows humour, the song is an authentic and honest depiction of what it feels like to be a working class musician hitting rock bottom. 

Placid follows up debut single ‘Silly in the Mental’ with a black humour-fuelled telling of his past misdemeanors, continuing in his signature satirical style. Dark, disturbing and full of south London grit, this macabre offering is distinctly not for the faint hearted.

Resurrecting his demons like a stoned necromancer at a squat party, Placid embodies the shocking heavy-weight hitters of hardcore hip hop. Coming to mind immediately is the definitively unique and outrageously profane Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Placid doesn’t hold back this time, diving in straight away with expletives and obscenities that would make any grandmother faint at the dinner table. Like something out of ‘Night of The Living Dead,’ Placid reminisces back to the days where he spammed the self destruct button, drawing on the hopelessness young creatives frequently feel. In a time where young people’s mental health is at its lowest since records began. Neuro Placid is what happens when the bleak reality of cost of living crisis Britain meets the acerbic, yet stoic and deadpan humour of today’s youth. 

Placid yet again lays out his past crimes for all to see, making no apologies for his wayward, drug-fuelled shenanigans. Instead of “quitting drugs for good” Placid jests that he is now “using them for evil.” Placid screams at his own door, hears voices in his head beatboxing and then ultimately face plants into the pavement in the middle of the street. Heading into the hook, Placid rhetorically implores “Did I stutter?” while emphatically stuttering the line. It’s self-deprecating, it’s unusual, yet surprisingly effective. Sprawling with black humour laden pop culture references, there’s laughs to be found everywhere. One minute, Placid asks Kurt Cobain to pass him the needle, then the next he is slimed up like Alien’s Sigourney Weaver while having a heart to heart with Jesus Christ. 

Placid’s free-associative rhymes are spat out in a distinctive half-rapped, half-sung style. Humming and singing in a deranged Joker mumble, MDMA is like ‘The Exorcist’ meets ‘Thriller’ meets the underbelly of gig after-parties at 3am, when everybody looks and feels at their most grotesque. Placid is again unyielding in his manner and does not care to mince his words in the chorus as he announces “I’M DYING, I’M DYING, I’M DYING!” hoping in earnest that “the ambulance is quick.” 

As with the previous single, Placid emphasizes that much of this grisly self-harm culminates from existing in a fervently unbearable, unwelcoming and poverty-stricken Britain. Hardcore is Placid’s speciality and, taking up the megaphone once more, Placid gets his politically charged point across successfully. Illustrating the unpalatable reality of working-class artists in a zombified metaphor as opposed to dousing it all with sugar, MDMA is a gruesome yet Oscar-worthy performance of social satire at its finest. 

‘MDMA’ comes across as an unfiltered, bleak yet strikingly accurate insight into the ghoulish controversiality of inner-city nightlife. Here, Placid employs crude social realism wrapped in thorny cynicism to paint a picture of the often cruel and unforgiving nature of London while under the influence.