TITLE: 12 DOGS
DATE:
25-04-25
TIME:
11:19
COLLABORATOR: 12 DOGS
TEXT: SAM HARDING
PHOTOGRAPHY: KYLE THOMSON
WORD COUNT: 3960
IMAGE COUNT: 14
TAGS:
X
REACH THE SKY
It’s almost a blank slate. The cover bears a lone, winged symbol against a white background, a specimen preserved in ebbing brushstrokes. The music beams in from wherever the source of music is these days. A transmission from the static, flickering through splinters of light and circuitry. It’s a document of a group moving at the speed of sound, their lives flashing before their eyes as the horizon comes crashing down.
It’s a record called Fireflies.
In the year 2025, anyone who doesn’t recognise the artists collectively known as 12 Dogs is not alone. Beyond their relative obscurity as an underground outfit operating out of Johannesburg’s East Side, their new album only scorches the picture. It unearths itself a like a time capsule, a clutch of sonic artefacts interrupted on their way between the analog past and some space-age future. To many new listeners, this will characterise the electric feeling of discovery that frames it— an album that seems to have emerged out of a vacuum, fully-formed, while only posing questions about where it comes from and the lives that project from it like burning photographs. Of course much can be answered, in this age of information, social media and online profiles, but at its core what Fireflies captures, and then releases, is something truly evanescent in between the time signatures of art and life. The way songs remain the same over the years while reflecting the changes that have taken place in the lives of those who listen to, and make them. An ephemerality that puts everything else, be it fame or posterity or meaning, into a different perspective. Perhaps no group understands this like 12 Dogs.
Four years ago Justin Blanckensee, Thabi Holele, Kabir Jugram and Lukas van Garderen, debuted a project called Consequence of Sound. It was a rap album that instantly announced 12 Dogs as a group of teenaged prodigies, making music far removed from the trends in favour of something more timeless. Over meticulously crafted beats they wove cyphers, protests and sombre vigils into a panoramic vision of South Africa, threading the immediacy of violence and adolescence into a vivid tapestry of colonial histories and revolutionary movements. A conscious album then, blazing like a lit flare up against centuries of exploitation, Consequence nevertheless managed to escape the weight of its subject matter via the sheer finesse of its lyrics and production, across head-snapping hooks, fleet verses and delicate codas finding solace in vistas of the natural world. This assured gravity was the imprint of young people with something to say and a seemingly effortless way of saying it; a quality that infused its already portentous title with an air of prophecy. But like most prophecies, this ended up harbouring an entirely unforeseen twist of fate.
Made and released during the limbo-like years of the COVID pandemic, with no rollout or fanfare beyond the clicking of the upload button, Consequence of Sound ended up going largely unnoticed by the world. Instead it gave way to years in which its creators would graduate high school and start university, all while continuing to hang out on Lukas’s porch, making beats and laying down verses in his bedroom studio. Which is to say, it gave way to normal life, along with the whiplash of moving forwards as musicians in the wake of the fact that they had already produced their opus, to an echoing silence.
A restless period of reinvention followed, as they switched up styles across a deluge of unreleased demos that experimented with trap, dance and even alternative rock textures, shredding their overtly political POV while honing in on a fiery core of rap— a pack of hardcore vocalists befitting their name. This approach extended into live shows and an increasing set of collaborations with rappers in the East Side. A comeback was in the making.
And then, in 2023, they parted ways with Biko Mabuse, the fifth member of 12 Dogs. In many ways, Mabuse had been the face of the group, a frontman figure with the commanding vocal presence to match. Moving on from the split, each of the new sonic directions they had been exploring suddenly felt like scattered parts without a whole. Where what made Consequence of Sound such an amazing record was its overall cohesion, crystallising the many voices of the 12 Dogs project into a single polished statement. Would lightning ever strike twice?
To cut a long story short: Fireflies is their best work yet, a sophomore project reflecting a maturation of just about every strand in the 12 Dogs DNA. And what’s more, the stunning discrepancy between the quality of their music and the size of their audience has been addressed on an album that seems to reject any terms for making music other than their own. At the centre of this development is the tumult of the past few years, and how the construct of their musical identity, of 12 Dogs as a container for a certain sound or message, has been cracked wide open. It plays like a natural successor to Consequence, elaborating that album’s multitudes into a dazzling reflection of the post-digital, post-genre waters their generation has long been swimming in. An act of collective authorship that shrugs off the national stage and the strictures of hip-hop, which had each threatened to eclipse or prescribe their individual identities. The voices that emerge on Fireflies are even more raw, wise and searching, across a kaleidoscopic vision that sounds like an indie film on a blockbuster budget, somewhere between Boyhood (2014) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
I AM MUSIC
“Entropy and stasis” raps Holele on “Armour”, one of the album’s lead singles, before declaring “the canvas is vacant”. It’s an image that seems to collapse in on itself, establishing one of the album’s key through-lines: namely the tension between the years of silence that came before it and the expectations that go along with finally breaking it— the idea of narrating a continuity that doesn’t exist. “There’s painting on the easel / read between the lines” echoes Blanckensee, in another deconstruction of the same sentiment. What moments like these ultimately trace is the impression of lives lived outside of these songs; the hidden weight of time behind every lyric; all shot through with the experience of leaving your teenage years behind and finding your visions of the future turning to dust. Where what was once the urgent materialism of their lyrics, and even the specificity of their identity as South African firebrands, has now fragmented into an existential search for meaning in an illusory, imperilled world.
It’s a shift marked early on by the perilous ease with which they glide across these tracks. On both “Armour” and “Wolf”, two melodic rap cuts, each vocalist weaves through shimmering thickets of production, between azure strings and ozone 808s, with all the precision-engineered finesse of a White Ferrari. But compared to the joyriding antics of Consequence, their new POV finds them isolated in the drivers seat, looking inwards while contemplating a speed that might let them catch up with the horizon and leave the earth behind. Meanwhile the world around them piles up in a blur of impressionistic glimpses, a wintry landscape of dry grass and wildfires, gunshots blooming into fireworks, sirens bleeding out into the smoky air. It’s feverish imagery, lit up by acid tabs and ultraviolet LEDs, with Jugram in particular unfolding a biblical backdrop of swirling omens and bloodlines.
It all comes across as an attempt to outrun their numbness, in what was once a compact group now broken up into individuals working through their own pains; lone wolves patching themselves up over the lush instrumentation. Where even the natural world in which Consequence of Sound took refuge now renders like a simulation, something as chemical as the very emotions flowing through them, diluted by medication and overexposure, fading with the setting sun. This also describes a tension between the wilderness of experience and the act of making music itself, the way a series of vibrations put to metal becomes a way of imposing form upon of chaos. An act that compresses meaning. But which also has the potential to explode it.
“It can do anything but stand up and take a bow”. These are the first words you hear on Fireflies, a sample of the late conductor Leonard Bernstein onstage at the New York Philharmonic as he presided over a display of the new Moog synthesiser. An invention that revolutionised musical composition, opening up the spectrum of sounds that could be harnessed while ushering in a cascade of increasingly accessible electronic tools, forever transforming music into a duet with the machine. In the case of 12 Dogs, the quote encapsulates both their expansive musical range and aversion to the limelight, or at least to the promotional logic of dropping singles and chasing hits. It’s a sly note to begin on, but one that gestures above all to the technologies that have come to script both reality and cultural production. Where broadly speaking, a synthesiser is a device that creates a whole from parts, a somewhat rote definition that can gloss over how fraught the process of creativity is, one in which the author is just one component within a factory-line that crests the messy details of their own lives as well as the public reception to their art.
This infuses the pearly radio textures of the album’s opening intro, as they glitch and swell into the manifesto-like "This Machine”— a track that mutates with anger, pain and bravado as each member of 12 Dogs presents a different reflection upon their return to music, defiant one moment and bitter the next, chasing greatness while mourning all that has been lost along the way. The track is built from an interpolation of “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd—which memorialised the loss of a bandmate on difficult terms. And yet despite this allusion to their own fractured group, it’s another Pink Floyd album that ends up coming even quicker to mind. Only instead of the image of one beam of light being split into a frieze of different colours, Fireflies finds itself at the centre of the rainbow, winged with its many inputs and their transformation into vivid new arrangements.
The results are an array of hybrid forms, especially productions such as “Light Attacks” and the spare, acoustic “Love Song”. “I see 12 Dogs as a filter,” elaborates Blanckensee. “To me a track like Love Song is when you take Joni Mitchell and Adrianne Lenker and Prince and Mk.Gee and filter it through the 12 Dogs box. This is what comes out on the other side”. An approach less about reconciling their different influences, than refracting them into stranger, more idiosyncratic shapes. “[We were] always trying to push that horizon where it’s a new sound, new samples, stretching shit, using AI to remove different instruments from samples to get all these weird artefacts. All of that comes through this filter and still becomes a rap song, but there’s all that other stuff on the other side that comes through as a remnant.”
Holele spells this out even further: “Especially as I get more proficient at production, on a lot of music I’ve started seeing the brushstrokes. You hear the ingredients, you taste the cinnamon and it’s just cinnamon. It’s not like when you’re fifteen and you taste the cinnamon and it’s like ‘Wow I’m in Ratatouille and I’m floating'. When I heard Love Song for the first time, I heard the country element, and I heard the tempo and I heard the slap-back echo on the vocals which reminded me of that being novel, of the 60s. Fireflies feels like us negotiating with the fact that music has become a series of symbols. It’s in conversation with that, [saying] how do we make it exciting nonetheless.” In this vein, Thabi’s separate identity as an alternative solo artist became a kind of raw material, something he could break apart and reconfigure into the 12 Dogs processor; a guitar in a digital blender. “This felt like a good synecdoche for what I felt like my contribution was, like taking the personal, taking the singer-songwriter and making it post-modern. Instead of playing it I sample it, instead of singing it I rap it.”
This ended up becoming the logic shaping the album as a whole; the sound of a group rewiring themselves at breakneck speed, a programme born out necessity. “It caused a lot of roles to be reversed,” explains Van Garderen of their split with Mabuse. “Justin and Thabi produced like a lot on the album, whereas before the albums were produced by me and Biko. So in a way it forced us to see new sides of ourselves.” Without a doubt, the most pronounced avatar for this is Van Garderen himself, stepping behind the mic for the first time after years in which he solely limited himself to the production of their music. His verses reveal a technician’s instinct for structure, shifting in and out of the mix while accentuating the grain of his smoky voice. He and Blanckensee both mine a particularly rich contrast between autotuned textures and moments where the whole composition turns on a delicately sung vocal. Meanwhile Jugram doubles down on his role as the group’s seer, a conduit for revelations surrounding the act of self-expression. “I struggle a lot with vulnerability and writing is such a vulnerable thing. Especially on this album. So when I write, the imagery comes from those two things coming together, where I want to make sense of the world around me, in my mind and my subconscious, but I don’t want to give too much away. So layering things in imagery and motifs and metaphors, that’s how I express myself best. How I make sense of myself to myself.”
All in all, the album emerged from a series of eureka moments, in which any previously held limitations revealed themselves as barriers to be overcome. “It wasn’t fulfilling me spiritually,” continues Van Garderen, about his past life as the group’s producer. “[Rapping] gave me a whole new investment into the music. And it really just started because my laptop broke. I couldn’t make beats for a while, and around this time I had a lot of things to say. And I feel like actually I’ve always wanted to do it, I just never had the self belief.” These moments circle a larger breakthrough, one that Van Garderen distills into a simple provocation: “All I knew was how to make music but I didn’t know why.” The attempt to answer this question is the burning filament at the heart of Fireflies, a spark that quickly erupts into into smoke and fire, raw emotions and numbing disillusionment, as the opening tracks seem to take that question literally— exposing the machinery that lies behind the virtual productions of both music and reality. This gradually smoulders into a far more delicate state, as the matrix recedes into the background and the stakes are raised even higher, in a contemplation of nothing less than what it means to survive in this crazy world, beneath the constant threat of oncoming catastrophe. It’s a suspense that hinges on the fragility of individual moments; the relationships and memories you find yourself holding onto when the sky falls down.
This infuses the tracks at the album’s heart, from the warmth flickering in the porch-light of “Love Song”, to the hardened vulnerability of "How Can I Protect You”, which was the first track recorded for the album and in many ways ignited the emotional texture that the group spent the rest of the recording process chasing. This builds into "Wrapped In Ur Arms", an amorous blaze of a track which projects seconds, years, a million romantic sparks into the night sky, like a bonfire of coming-of-age movies, unapologetic in its tenderness. The song features fellow East Side rapper SC23, who adapts his usual brand of compact street vignettes into a breezy relationship postmortem. It also serves as a covert introduction to the group’s newest member, Lumko Ntshikila, who’s verse appears like a shooting star, a momentary flicker of things to come.
The album’s progression brings it closer in form to its predecessor, a narrative quality to its overall structure that belies its more eclectic palette. "We had to work hard to get to a point where we felt like Fireflies and Consequence of Sound at least came from the same parents,” says Blanckensee. “I see Fireflies as Consequence’s older sister. You [can] imagine a family of these two siblings who are both revolutionary-minded in their own ways, but it’s like Consequence is the younger brother who is angry with capitalism and the state and these very material things. And the older sister is reading Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guatarri. She’s still political but it’s in a very different way.” This evolution in their approach is expressed above all through the Fireflies motif, and a familiar image of hope in the darkness that quickly reveals itself as something far more mercurial and elusive.
At first glance, the symbolism is transparent. Fireflies are insects whose signature glow is brightest when they are young, and who’s existence is increasingly threatened as a result of industrialised society, especially light pollution. All of this maps onto the broadest conditions of making art under late-stage capitalism, along with how the eclipse of the natural world is echoed by the loss of innocence that accompanies growing up. And yet beneath the symbol there is a bioluminescent organism, a creature that dissolves into itself, metamorphosing from a larva into a beetle. It hibernates in tree bark and then spreads its wings, taking to the sky for a few short summer weeks, flickering its neon trails against the deep blues of those long twilight hours. The light it emits is cold, with no infrared or ultraviolet frequencies, and it represents both a warning for predators as well as a visual cue for sexual communication. Most bioluminous fireflies are female, inflecting an already androgynous silhouette. All of this, every alien detail about these insects, imbues the album Fireflies with a poetic intensity that comes alive across memories of sunburned skin and the crackle of flaming bones, snow-covered highways and moonlit tundra, tear drops and fake jewellery, a collage of visceral images that collapse the natural and the synthetic into glittering new hues; red blood shining under the fluorescence of streetlamps. It evokes a world in which you might consider a firefly a piece of bio-tech, or music as a device for fossilising memory, preserving it as shards. A world in which humans, technology and nature are intertwined at the root. Fireflies feels in search of a metaphor that can access and embody these multitudes, suspending them in a flash before they come apart beneath the veil of everyday life.
Across the album, phrases are cracked off, cliché is embraced sideways, language is broken into stumps from which new meanings can bloom. This feels integral to the 12 Dogs name itself, as a phrase already overflowing beyond its five members to some elemental image of animals loping across the horizon, driven by instinct alone. The line that first introduced the album’s central motif is equally animate. “We’re like fireflies in the field / running to the sun,” sings Blanckensee on the title track, in a flickering of legs and wings and fire and grass. Blanckensee is one of the principal architects of this particular lyrical approach, drawing inspiration from another musical tinkerer with whom he shares the same first name. Where the question “What if Bon Iver made a rap album?” became another current running through the recording process. After first stumbling upon the fireflies image, Blanckensee found himself becoming obsessed with its potential meanings, and a desire to live within them that went as far as a colour-coded uniform that he wore for the duration of its production. He pushed the rest of the group towards an album shaped by this image, and it is clear across everyone’s vocals that they all saw the same thing, a vision shrouded by smoke and yet ready at any moment to burst into light. This builds to a crescendo on “Riot”, the album’s penultimate track, which rises into the sky on flaming wings, incandescent with bruises and a hard-won ecstasy that feels like leaving the earth behind, until you realise it’s just the sound of people making music against all odds, when all other reasons have been burned away.
“Part of the point is capitalism is to dilute experience, to make it commercial,” concludes Holele. And so as we’ve been speaking about music as a series of symbols, in a time where music has been made a product— what does a hopeful vision of making music look like?” Blanckensee paints an even bigger picture: “I had found this essay written by Pasolini, the Italian leftist filmmaker, and he has an essay about what he calls the genocide of fireflies in the Italian countryside. He talks about how after the second world war, fascism in Italy in particular took a very covert, underground way of exacting itself. Through police violence and that kind of thing, not explicit fascism or dictatorship but it came through in other ways and it became an emotional oppression. And he spoke about the growing industrialisation in Italy, how it killed off these fireflies in the countryside and he was like: that’s what’s happening to us. And that was cool, but then there was this philosopher who wrote a book in 2006 responding to that essay, and contemplating the idea of being a firefly as a mode of resistance against the current state. Like the death of experience, the death of identity, the idea of survival itself being a form of resistance. Because the fireflies in Italy aren’t actually dead, there are still fireflies there, but one must search to find them, they aren’t freely available. And that’s where he takes it. To hope and spiritual resistance against late-stage capitalism and against the growing rise of fascism in the world, it comes through in our dedication to survival, our dedication to visibility, to being bright, to making these kinds of works.”
On the final track, Holele has a verse that seems to sum the whole album all up, minus its themes, just a glimpse of life. He sings about a relationship and a plane taking off. Perhaps the turbulence brings everything into focus, but in just a few short lines we experience all the vicissitudes of distance and connection, across timezones and technologies, the words that traverse the chasms of modern life. The scene ends on a cliffhanger, one that acknowledges the way things might not be ok, while finding a vantage from which that almost doesn’t matter.
I said that one or two times
I think I might have been high
If I forget don’t remind me
I had just almost died
First person I call when the doctors reply
12 Dogs had already come a long way before they started making art from a place in which everything had gone up in smoke. A perspective from which reality might as well be a virtual figment, or a technicolour flashback from your final moments on earth. You might think this an almost impossible place to be vulnerable or hopeful from. But perhaps the opposite is true. Fireflies is the kind of rare artefact that might only reveal its true form to some unknown future. Somehow I doubt that its flame will go unnoticed until then.