MIN t – Berlin-based Polish artist drops “Hope” – first single from her upcoming album

MIN t – Hope (Single Review)

★★★★

Some artists write hope as a warm blanket. Martyna Kubicz aka MIN t writes it as a stone that drags you down and still refuses to let go — and on 'Hope', the lead single from her forthcoming third album, that distinction matters. A lot.

Martyna Kubicz has been sitting with this tension for a while. On the first single from her forthcoming third album Before The After, she finally detonates it.

Place MIN t on Berlin's musical map and the coordinates get interesting. She's not Berghain-adjacent — this isn't techno, and it was never going to be. Her world sits closer to the city's quieter experimentalists: the intimate stages of Panke and Badehaus, the circuit that nurtures artists who refuse to collapse their ambitions into a single genre. That VTSS remixed her earlier single 'Start Dancing' is a telling data point — a bridge between Berlin's club infrastructure and something rawer, more songwriting-driven. The city has always sheltered artists who don't quite fit anywhere else, and Martyna Kubicz — ten years in, Berklee-trained, fully self-sufficient in the studio — is exactly the kind of artist Berlin deserves to claim. 'Hope' sounds like someone who has absorbed the city's freedom and is finally spending it.

'Hope' is built on a ferocious breakbeat, with glitch-heavy synths and a weighty low-end that shifts beneath your feet Babystep Magazine - architecture that recalls the bruised industrialism of Portishead's Third filtered through FKA twigs' body-horror precision. MIN t's background spans classical piano training from age seven, years at a music school in Wrocław, and later a scholarship to Berklee's Valencia campus, where she became the first Polish woman to be mentored by renowned engineer Susan Rogers Mybigplunge - the woman who shaped the sonic world of Purple Rain. That lineage is audible. 'Hope' doesn't sound like an artist assembling influences; it sounds like someone who has metabolised them, digested them slowly, and is now producing something entirely her own.

The track was entirely self-produced, mixed and engineered by MIN t - a fact she announced with visible pride, describing it as "something really big for me" Metal Magazine. In an industry where women producers are still routinely treated as anomalies, that assertion of total authorship is itself a political act. The music makes the case more convincingly than any statement could.

Her vocals shift registers mid-song - melodic, then blunt and rhythmic, then back - tracking the lyric's own refusal to settle into a single emotional posture. The words resist the comforting arc of the redemption narrative: "they mourn the rose, / when forests burn / all around the ashes glow" bandcamp. This is not hope as Instagram affirmation. It is hope as something earned through failure, stoked by anger, kept alive by sheer obstinate refusal to go quiet. The track's spoken-word bridge, where the critique of "self-care as manicure" lands like a flat palm on a table, is the most politically lucid thing released by a Berlin artist in recent memory.

The video, directed by Feedz and supported by Initiative Musik, opens with a dramatic explosion - stacked televisions representing media overload, choreography by Luliia Vetiugova mapping inner conflict onto the body Beatsway. It's the visual language of urgency without exploitation, protest without posturing.

Since relocating to Berlin in 2015, MIN t has clocked over 300 live shows, supporting HVOB, Angel Haze, Jess Glynne and Vitalic, and appearing at Reeperbahn, Off Festival and Open'er FEMMUSIC. A decade of grinding the circuit, learning every room. 'Hope' sounds like the moment all of that experience stops being preparation and starts being the thing itself.

Before The After arrives May 8th. On this evidence, it will be worth every minute of the wait.

MIN t - 'Hope' is out now. mintmk.bandcamp.com·@MIN_t_official

Photos (c) Wiktoria Rcyhlewski