Artist Profile: Restless Taxis
Restless Taxis, the genre-transient, noise-rock-influenced band based in London, has found their niche with the addition of Jess Nwosu and Dylan Haynes to their lineup just over a year ago, operating within the intuitive combination of the trio’s creative influences to bring a vision of a new sonic wave to fruition– one that incorporates a deeper sound and rhythm of the Black diaspora into the crushing sounds and cataclysmic renderings of shoegaze and post-punk’s usual genre-motifs.
The idea for the band began back when frontman Michael Asukyle was in secondary school. He had grown up enraptured by music, and his own creative leanings left him with a strong desire to start his own project. As a result of his self-described neurosis, he spent months trying to come up with a name for the band. “Restless Taxis” came from a combination of random words he jotted down in a notebook during this process.
Restless Taxis as a project, has therefore, been around for several years. But, at its formation, it was primarily a leisurely venture– Michael struggled to find musicians who would take it as seriously and as passionately as he hoped to.
Their mantra has always been decidedly DIY, however. From their earliest days, Michael and the original Restless Taxis lineup were playing squat shows around London, fitting into the local rave scene and drawing together a small, devoted fanbase with the uniqueness of their sound. It was at one of these shows that Dylan first encountered the band, and he knew immediately that, in some way, he needed to be a part of the energy they were projecting.
“They put on this squat show in this abandoned Edgeware Road train station. They played, another band played, and then it was DJs till whatever time,” said Dylan, “As soon as I saw that rave [laughs], I was like, ‘I need to be in this band.’”
When Restless Taxis’ original drummer left for a lengthy trip, Dylan got his opportunity. They then added Jess when they needed a bassist to fill in for a gig. Immediately, the combination of the members felt distinctly intuitive– like they understood and reshaped the vision Michael had on a fundamental level.
“It's very much like the people who are playing now have their own creative input what I've already established,” said Michael, “Whereas before I was trying to get people to sort of get what I was doing, but Dylan and Jess understand it… All of our different influences just culminate in our playing.”
The band has a deeper catalog that can be heard primarily at their live shows– even a whole album written that’s been refined in that atmosphere over the past year– but even the extent of their catalog that’s available on streaming displays an intense commitment to amorphousness: a willingness to change and evolve as the ideas of the band blossom.
Their 2021 single, “Migraine”, takes on a distinctively noise-rock-influenced bent, incorporating searing guitars and Michael’s forlorn vocals in a rambling, almost seven-minute runtime. 2023’s “Swan” takes these ideas to extreme, soaring outwards at the listener in suffocating fashion. 2025’s “Slugs” and “Truth”, meanwhile, show (in some ways) a stark evolution for the band, incorporating dub and sound-collage elements while playing into the distinct sweetness that Jess’s vocals provide in addition to Michael’s. “Maggie’s”, their most recent single, is therefore an extension of all of these ideas in a singular track– it oscillates between a lighter rock overtone and a seismic, dub and reggae-influenced interpolation that keeps the listener guessing for the entirety of the sonic experience.
As Jess describes it, their particular sound fills a niche– one that attracts a certain type of listener and draws them in, captivated with the band’s seemingly never-ending ability to shapeshift and adapt to the moment.
“I feel like, because we have such a queer sound, we have like a specific type of person that just kind of just gets it. [You can] see it in their eyes, the eyes just light up, they come up to us and they're like, ‘When's the album coming out?’ And [there’s] people that don't get it; that's just kind of where we are right now.”
As Restless Taxis continues to lurk in the London underground scene, their commitment to self-sufficiency– to bucking the industry expectations and creating their own spaces to exercise their sound– remains as strong as ever. It is this uniqueness, and this sense of selfhood and identity, that makes Restless Taxis one of the UK’s most intriguing up-and-coming projects.
“I think it's just something within Black identity that cannot be presented through words. It's something I feel is quite inevitable and hard to describe.. I don't need to put it into words, because we just kind of understand each other on this metaphysical level,” said Michael, “I feel like we're just so similar, but also different in different ways that it just has culminated into the sound that we have now.”
