Maehem99 doesn’t ask permission to enter. Instead, they pull you straight into the club, into the pulsing dark, into the strobe that wipes your face away. As a result, you become just another body on the floor, and everything begins to shift.
From there, excess takes over and no one looks too closely. Because of that, something new starts to form. It feels unfamiliar at first. However, it is also recognizable, like everything you’ve heard before, but with its guts exposed.
The Irish-South African artist didn’t begin with music. First came the image, and then, gradually, the voice. Fashion teaches you to exist on the surface. It asks you to become whatever the lens needs, and over time, that leaves a mark.
Therefore, Sexual Commerce, their debut EP out June 18, feels like a reckoning. It doesn’t romanticize the past. Instead, it breaks it open. Across five tracks, Maehem99 revisits modeling, while also confronting nightlife and everything that comes with it.
This is not a confessional record. Rather, it functions as a document, observing what was gained and what slowly decayed underneath.
The lead single, I Can’t Be Your Guy, establishes this immediately. From the start, there is urgency. Synths press from below, while the voice carries something almost devotional, holding tension without releasing it.
Yet beneath that, something darker moves. It feels filthy and hedonistic, echoing FKA Twigs at her most unsettling, or Arca when chaos becomes strangely beautiful.
As a result, the euphoric and the disturbing share the same space. The same rhythm. “We move faster, faster, faster…” and you follow, even if you’re not entirely sure where it leads.
Visually, the narrative remains just as direct. The video returns to the VIP club where Mae once danced, and nothing is softened or reimagined.
There is the cold metal of the pole, the worn leather sofa, sunken eyes, a bound chest, legs parted, and a t-shirt that reads I LOVE MY WIFE, where irony sits somewhere between humor and discomfort.
Importantly, there is no distance here. The autobiographical material and the staging are the same. In other words, this is not an aesthetic choice, but a way of understanding that world.
The EP artwork pushes this further. In their former sugar daddy’s home, Maehem99 sets fire to one of his expensive shirts, turning a private history into a controlled gesture.
Then they face the camera directly. There is no visible catharsis, no dramatization. Instead, there is control, the kind that comes from knowing exactly what that past means.
At that point, it becomes clear that it no longer belongs to him. It belongs entirely to them.
Some artists describe their experiences. Others create from within them, and Maehem99 clearly belongs to the latter. Because of that, Sexual Commerce does not explain or justify anything.
Instead, it places you inside it. The image, the decay beneath it, and the identity reshaped through it all exist at the same time, without separation.
Everything fits within five tracks, and nothing feels excessive. It is precise, contained, and intentional from beginning to end.
It is a first release. However, it does not feel like one. The vision is already fully formed, and more importantly, it sounds complete.
