8/10

ILUKA has never been one to play quietly, but her new album 'the wild, the innocent, & the raging' feels like the moment she tears the last layer of gauze from her voice and lets the full blaze of her identity burn through. This is a record forged in defiance, and it signals a version of ILUKA who is no longer content to squeeze herself into the margins for anyone’s comfort.

From the first note of 'Witch Girls', there’s a sense of feral clarity as she knows exactly who she is now, and she’s not asking for permission. Across fourteen tracks, ILUKA embraces the messy, emotional spectrum of womanhood with sharp wit and open wounds. Love, frustration, desire, grief, and fury; each emotion gets its own technicolour treatment, delivered through her signature blend of alt-pop brashness and poetic grit.

That rebellious energy hits its peak on the single 'Crucify Me', a searing highlight that pulls no punches. Her voice slices through the arrangement like a warning siren as she confronts the way strangers construct false versions of her, only to punish her for failing to perform their fantasy. The track is a portrait of a woman who refuses to let the world shame her into silence.

Beneath the fire, though, lies tenderness. ILUKA grew up watching her father craft guitars by hand, and that intimacy with sound still pulses through her music. Even when she’s raging, there’s reverence for connection and survival. She writes protest songs with heart, pop songs with teeth, and confessions with the weight of lived experience.

'the wild, the innocent, & the raging' captures an artist fully stepping into her power, delivering something unfiltered, radiant, and gloriously disruptive. ILUKA is expanding in every direction here, building a world where the strange, the loud, and the unbreakable finally have space to thrive.