By Gary Suarez in Interviews — Jun 25, 2025

Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals Are For The Children

An interview with the Baltimore-based hip-hop duo behind 'A City Drowned In God's Black Tears'

Photo credit: Micah E Wood

When it comes to justifications for what's happened in Gaza since October 7, 2023, Baltimore-based duo Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals are having none of it. Ten blistering seconds into their latest album A City Drowned In God's Black Tears, on opening salvo and lead single "The Iron Wall," the latter half of this hip-hop duo begins decrying Palestinian genocide and raging against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in no uncertain terms as "the new Hitler."

Notably, Ennals' full-throated radical ire–shared by his producer/multi-instrumentalist cohort–is hardly limited to the obvious villains of the moment, but rather extends back in time over the course of the track to point fingers and cast blame. "I never want to let Obama off the hook in particular," he says. "Biden had still been deporting more people than Trump has at this point in his [second] administration, so those guys need to get called out."

Infinity Knives, also known as Tariq Ravelomanana, breaks it down for me in even more personal terms. "I love children with my whole heart; there's nothing I love more in this world," he says, holding back tears as he speaks. "I would die for them. The least I can do is say something about it."

"I don't want anybody to think that this is just an anti-Trump thing," Ennals adds. "It's a general anti-imperialism thing, and those guys are just as responsible as anybody else."

Even for those who disagree, in part or in whole, with such positions or characterizations, nobody reasonable can dismiss the direct, unambiguously blunt way Ravelomanana and Ennals transmit their stance, certainly not in these dire times both domestically and abroad. Their approach is undeniably aligned with a longstanding hip-hop lineage that includes greats like Public Enemy, dead prez, and Immortal Technique, all artists who weaponized platforms and wielded mics to speak out against systemic racism, war profiteering, and related topics.

"One of my best friends, he's a carpenter," Ravelomanana says. "Most of my friends, actually, are Domino's drivers and shit like that. They're not going to read 'Das Kapital'. So we have to explain it to them like, yo, I know that Trump really appeals to you, dude, but this is why he shouldn't."

Much like it was in those artists' respective heydays, the probability of backlash remains high today, as their erstwhile touring partners Kneecap know all too well. "It's easy now for me to say shit like this and be labeled an antisemite," Ravelomanana concedes. "I'm not, obviously, but if you want me to agree that I am and you stop bombing children, then I'll be one. Just fucking stop it and stop making it Palestinians' problems."

Like their predecessors, the pair not only use pointed rhetoric but, when it suits, employ humor to ensure that their messages resonate. "Brian said this to me in a really funny context," Ravelomanana says, in an attempt at succinct summary. "I was like, would you suck P. Diddy's dick for 10 billion dollars? And he was like, no. You got to stand for something."

To hear that principled irreverence on record, look only to "BAGGY," which kicks off by calling Kobe Bryant a rapist (a reference to the late basketball star's 2003 sexual assault case) and then proceeds to deliver one of the most epic bars in coke rap history: from the river to the sea / from a baggie to a key.

"When I did the hook for Tariq for the first time in the studio about to record, he lost his fucking mind," Ennals says of that particular couplet, one that continues their streak of honesty over recreational drug use. "Obviously I was thinking about the situation going on in Gaza. Not to commercialize a genocide, but I'm like, that could be catchy."

"He was wasted when he did that song," Ravelomanana says, adding that he himself has been "off the yaya" for some time. "That song was Brian just being a drunk, drunk old man and just going off. That beat was just me fucking around; it wasn't supposed to be on the record."

"There's that juxtaposition," Ennals says of the "BAGGY" hook, "between something that represents something, a movement that is trying to do something for the good of humankind, and then us just being kind of depraved individuals."

Commerical hip-hop right now largely feels formulaic, trend-chasing, and utterly apolitical, perhaps more so than ever before. But Ennals insists that even the independent rap world deserves criticism for its own sins in this regard. "In a lot of ways the underground is just as stagnant as what you would call mainstream," he says. "Everybody's been spinning their wheels for a long time in a genre that used to move forward exponentially."

For Ravelomanana, silence and submission as an artist and a human being simply isn't an option. Though as an adult he's dealt with homelessness and poverty firsthand, he spent the first 11 years of his life in Africa prior to experiencing the culture shock of immigrating to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Islamophobia and anti-Blackness were overt, caricatured and demonized in America media, which felt all the more baffling to a kid who'd grown up around diversity. "I'd just moved from Johannesburg, which is a bustling metropolis," he says. "They were like, so do you guys have to get water from the river? Like, what the fuck are you talking about, dude?"