Bad With Phones aka Manny T Deroy is a South London artist/musician and self-proclaimed luddite, swearing that a healthy relationship with the self beats any amount of doom scrolling session you can get through your phone. Like a time traveller from the future, he has come to has come to remind all those who this message resonates with to slow the fuck down, show love to yourself and to get away from your phones.

Manny stopped carrying a phone for six months, as a sort of social experiment to see if he could live in the 21^st century without one. “I wanted to see why we all feel so obligated to own one,” he explains, smirking as he recalls the annoyance of all the friends who struggled to reach him.

The Deptford-born bassist and producer is a one-off, a future don of weirdo pop, R&B, rap and post-punk, who transmits songs that are epic and iconic, low key hypnagogic and soaked in bliss and damage, like Tyler The Creator, Grace Jones or Basquiat if they’d grown up in 1990s Deptford listening to Sade and David Bowie.

Manny’s father was a preacher, while his older brothers played in the church band. This upbringing was the backdrop to his music, but Deroy’s sound is decidedly genre-agnostic. Raised to Togolese parents who exclusively listened to gospel artists, Manny started to explore his brothers’ record collections and became affixed with the likes of Wu-Tang, Notorious B.I.G. and TLC.

2024 Bad With Phones album ‘CRASH’ combined the high-wire duality of immediate recognisability and authentic individuality. The album is packed with intimate anthems and comedown soothers for the day after a mangled night out.

Now, emerging again in 2026 and not content to stay within any kind of categorization, Bad With Phones is evolving gloriously with ‘The man who eats metal meat’ EP, a five-track voyage that moves rebelliously through a smorgasbord of styles; from spacious spoken word contemplations, to soulful alt-pop, laced together by cosmic atmospheres.

“The man who eats metal meat ep is an alter ego, an embodiment of a version of myself that’s a reminder of my resilience, determination to triumph and bounce back no matter what”, explains Manny. “The new character rides spaceships and has a crew of other travellers who travel through worlds and observe realities they blend in with the times and sometimes they don’t. In this version of reality there’s not so much blending in”, he further explains.

The next single to be lifted from the EP, ‘Human’ is, on the surface a high energy, rude and naughty club song to dance to, but it’s also a very personally important song for Bad With Phones.

“I wrote Human for my son who passed away days after he was born. The whole thing felt like an out of body experience”, Deroy explains. “Human is about birth and death respecting the way life plays out. I could rationalize that maybe the kid got all they needed from the planet maybe they thought they didn’t need to experience any more. We all go through things in life no one’s exempt from a heart break. I’m glad I was able to express my experience, and I genuinely hope it is a help to anyone who’s experienced something similar. I believe if you have life, you should celebrate it and ultimately the song is a celebration of life. It’s my anthem to liberation of all kinds”, he further explains.