On February 4, 2025, Klein released thirteen sense, her ninth studio album in less than ten years. The South London artist had put out marked, a noise metal record, the previous July. The two albums share a label, Parkwuud Entertainment, which Klein runs herself, and very little else. marked is abrasive and percussive. thirteen sense builds through layers of guitar feedback and ambient drone. Klein released both within seven months without a press cycle between them, without a label asking her to wait, and without adjusting her output to fit a release calendar designed for someone else's schedule.
Nine Albums Nobody Could File
Klein's discography resists the kind of narrative arc that makes albums legible to music journalists. She did not start with a breakthrough and build from it. She started with ONLY, released independently in 2016, before Hyperdub picked up Tommy as an EP in 2017. Hyperdub's involvement brought attention from listeners who track that label's catalog. One album, Harmattan, appeared on Pentatone, the classical music imprint, in 2021. marked and thirteen sense both appeared on Parkwuud Entertainment, the label Klein founded and operates, within a year of each other.
That range across institutions and genres is rare. It is rarer still to pull it off without the music ever feeling like a strategy. Klein's work on Pentatone does not sound like an artist trying to reach a classical audience. Her noise metal work does not sound like an artist trying to reach heavy music listeners. The music follows what it follows, and the infrastructure serves the work rather than managing it.
The Guitar Work and What It Carries
Klein is of Nigerian heritage, raised in South London, and her sound draws on gospel, R&B, noise, metal, and the sonic traditions of Black British music. Those influences do not sit in separate tracks on her albums. On marked, the guitar work is brutal in ways that reference noise rock and metal, but the vocal approach draws on gospel and soul in ways that are specifically Black British and Nigerian in their register. The combination is not a fusion project. It is what the music sounds like when someone brings all of their actual influences to bear without filtering for legibility.
That refusal to filter has commercial consequences. marked did not chart. Neither did thirteen sense. Klein's Spotify page shows roughly 19,000 monthly listeners. The work reaches the people who find it, and does not perform the kind of availability that attracts algorithmic attention. That is a choice with a cost, and Klein makes it consistently.
What Laurel Halo and Mica Levi Recognized
In 2017, Klein appeared on Laurel Halo's album Dust, a record that sat at the intersection of electronic composition and texture-based production. Mica Levi, the composer known for the Under the Skin score, provided early encouragement for Klein's work. Arca, the Venezuelan producer and musician, offered similar encouragement in Klein's early years. That the attention came from formally rigorous artists rather than from taste-making publications says something about where Klein's music sits: in conversation with people working seriously on problems of sound rather than working on problems of audience.
Those relationships also mean her influence travels in directions that metrics do not capture. Klein has shaped the direction of artists whose profiles are considerably larger than hers. That is a normal feature of experimental music history. What is less common is sustaining that position for ten years without either breaking through commercially or losing the thread of the work.
Parkwuud as a Working Model
Parkwuud Entertainment is not a vanity imprint. It is the mechanism by which Klein makes records without requiring institutional permission. She controls the release schedule, the pricing, the distribution, and how the work is presented. When she releases two albums within seven months, no one in a label office is asking her to wait or to sequence differently. That absence of friction is not incidental to the quality of the output. Removing intermediaries from the production and release process leaves more energy for the work itself.
That model has become more common in experimental music since 2020, particularly as streaming revenue declined and direct relationships with listeners became more economically rational. Klein was operating this way before it became common. Running a label and a Bandcamp and a consistent release schedule while maintaining the quality evident across nine albums requires organizational discipline that the romantic narrative of the lone experimental artist tends to obscure. Klein is not simply creative. She is operational, and that operationality is part of what makes the creative output possible.
What Thirteen Sense Requires of the Listener
Pitchfork gave thirteen sense a 73, describing it as an enveloping noise LP that filters nu metal and millennial pop into experimental guitar music. Resident Advisor called it meditative, noting how the layering of feedback and drone builds and releases tension across the record's eleven tracks. Both descriptions are accurate. Neither explains what the album is for.
thirteen sense asks for a different kind of attention than most music released in 2025 asked for. It does not reward distracted streaming. It rewards staying with the sounds and the space between them. That is a cultural stance as much as an aesthetic one. The album argues, by existing and holding together, that the attention economy has not made that kind of listening obsolete. Klein has been making that argument since 2016. The records keep proving it.
