The Chinese military general and deity of war Guan Yu appears on the cover of SILVERWINGKILLER’s (SWK) first EP TRIAD FUNDED. He stands alone against a black background, layered as if hallucinated (or maybe just buzzing with a hard 303 bass). A symbol of bravery, violence and the modern-day gangster, Guan Yu acts as the guard to a breakneck, 12-minute joyride through a sweeping array of music styles, all through the eyes of the acerbic punk duo with a penchant for the taboo.
James Baca and Ni Yushang meet me in the smoking area of the Shacklewell Arms, east London. The band and their crew have travelled down from Manchester this morning to play a selection night curated by fellow electro-punkers Fat Dog.
SWK began as a private project. “You’ve got all these old industrial mills, factories and stuff, and a lot of them have these units they rent out for practice,” Baca tells me. But the electronic scene’s time in the mills was short-lived. “We don’t do it anymore because it costs so much. I was three grand in debt. It’s ridiculous, rent’s going up and it’s all a bit hard – but while it lasted it was good.”
Still, the joint practice space provided a sense of community and a place for Ni and Baca to test out material in the band’s early days. At a birthday party for Baca that functioned as a live debut, SWK was given life.
In the two years since then, the band’s reputation has exploded. After joining forces with Fat Dog in late 2024, the pair played their biggest gig to-date at the 2,500-capacity O2 Forum Kentish Town, just six months after their first performance. “That was a big, big gig for us,” says Baca. “A venue like that, I thought I was gonna have a heart attack onstage. I kept checking my pulse, I thought I’d pass out.”
Soon after, in central Shanghai, Ni’s friends and cousins packed out a dive bar resembling Brixton’s Windmill for their first gig in China. Ni’s lyrics are in English, Mandarin and Shanghainese dialect. “Here, no one understands anyway,” she tells me. “But in Shanghai I’m more nervous. They understand what I’m saying.”
TRIAD FUNDED’s unabashedly provocative subject matter provides fair reason for nerves. The name itself is a reference to Chinese gang culture, and songs on the EP span from “⼈⺠公園 (PEOPLE’S SQUARE)”, a devastating transformation of serenity into violence that references a neighbourhood in Shanghai, to “HOLD UP (ALL FIREARMS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM)” a surprising and ironic pro-gun, apocalyptic techno anthem. “Generally, the whole aesthetic and the world is meant to feel kind of illegal,” says Baca. “Like music you find on the dark web.”
He continues: “There’s a videogame designer in Japan called Suda51 who makes very ultra-violent video games; weird characters, weird situations, and I always feel like with SWK there’s parallels to that kind of universe. It soundtracks a video game or a sci-fi movie rather than being like a band band. SWK is a cinematic universe.”
Alongside gaming and film influences, the duo’s sonic palette is plainly exhibited. Of “ROOF ON FIRE (X OVER9000)”, which samples Rock Master Scott & The Dynamic Three’s track “The Roof Is On Fire”, Baca says, “You know ‘Beware’ by Death Grips? You know Death Grips? Their first album has a similar, heavy bass. When I was making the tune, and in my head I was trying to make vocal patterns, lyric patterns, in my head I couldn’t get out of ‘The roof! The roof! The roof is on fire!’ I thought, we can’t do that! But then I thought fuck it, let’s just sample it.”
There’s more in the works, with a second EP coming out this summer. “If the first EP is a Chinese gangster, the second EP is gonna be a Somali pirate. It’s more world music influenced, it has a lot of samples and stuff, but it’s still got that illegal feel. We’ve got a third but I won’t say just yet.
“As a band we get bored easily. Over the next five years we wanna keep changing and evolving, evolving – you never know, in the future we could have more members, I might be playing guitar, just wanna keep it not the same old shit all the time.”
Electronic punk, he says, is the best of both worlds. “I used to play the guitar loads in bands around here, and with guitar bands they all use the same formula. With electronic bands, there’s no formula… even with other bands, we’re in the same scene, but none of us sound the fucking same, we’re all different.
“With electronic music – we could’ve been like, we’ll have no drums, no vocalist, we’ll do it all from a DJ deck. But we wanna be a band. We wanna take people out. I’m not really a drummer, I just felt like it needed drums. It makes a difference from a producer/singer vibe. It’s like we’re a fucking band.”
The duo’s punk nature is apparent in their sound as well as attitude. “A lot of electronic bands have that Y2K kinda pop sound, and it hasn’t got that grittiness to it. SWK has more of that grittiness, that darkness, that kind of bite you would get from a punk band.”
When I see them live that evening, SWK embodies punk’s spirit. Both come alive onstage – you can see the sweat on their backs within a minute. Ni is the frontwoman, letting vocals rip and jumping the floorboards in for a full 45-minute set. Baca’s energy, miraculously, matches hers: he thrills the crowd with a moshpit dive and a squeaky (but punky) clarinet solo. Together, they are an exceptional show of force.
