For nearly 40 years now, Jennifer Herrema has tuned her inner antennae to the sound of the radio—or at least, the experience of listening to it. Navigating her vast discography—with Royal Trux, then RTX, and now Black Bananas—feels a lot like randomly sliding back and forth on an FM dial, where you might bounce between classic-rock fist-pumpers, retro roller-rink jams, crackly country golden oldies, and whatever weird shit the overnight DJ at your local campus station can get away with playing at 3 a.m.
The first Black Bananas album in 12 years exists in that space beyond the city limits where the signal starts to fade, faint transmissions of bygone pop hits dissolve into static, and rock gods become ghosts. Though it was long delayed by a combination of factors (including Royal Trux’s ill-fated late-2010s reunion and the pandemic), Bad Bunch feels like the logical next step for the project—which is to say it continues to push the group toward the illogical.
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On 2012’s Rad Times Xpress IV and 2014’s Electric Brick Wall, Herrema and bandmates Brian McKinley and Kurt Midness triggered an increasingly chaotic soundclash between two oft-segregated ’80s aesthetics: hotwired-Camaro hair metal and block-party electro. But where Black Bananas retained the ripped-denim facade of a rock group even in their most techno-curious moments, Bad Bunch dives deep into a B-boy bouillabaisse of hip-hop, R&B, dub, and pawn-shop electronics, blurring the line between experimental band and production team.
This is a strange group that only gets stranger the closer it veers to pop music. In the hands of a typical band, the opening “Nutrageous & Jam” might come off as a candlelit R&B boudoir ballad primed for Lite FM rotation. Black Bananas make it feel like you’re walking through a dream where the surroundings feel familiar, but the faces are blurred and you can’t understand what anyone’s saying. Herrema stumbles and mumbles her way into the track as if she’s just been roused from a years-long nap—perhaps fittingly, given that her band has been out of commission for over a decade—but instead of shaking off the grogginess, she lingers in that half-awake state, her vocals smeared into a brassy blare that fills the space where the soft-rock sax solo would go. And while it wouldn’t be a true Black Bananas song without some degree of shredding, the guitar solo is less a focal point than just another subliminal frequency to upset the equilibrium.
As “Nutrageous & Jam” makes clear from the jump, the one characteristic that’s always connected Herrema’s crazy-quilt canon—her distinctive, dirty ashtray of a voice—is fair game for pitch-shifting pulverization. Even at their most accessible, Black Bananas remain gratifyingly inscrutable: The stuttering trap claps, digitized vocal squeals, and vaporwave veneer of “Outta My Head” actually sound more like 2012 than anything Black Bananas were actually making in 2012, while the hypnagogic groover “Turkey Burgers” is a readymade zone-out soundtrack for health-conscious stoners seeking less fatty forms of protein to curb their late-night munchies. And where they once tricked out skeeze-metal riffs with rap-schooled beat science, Herrema and co. are now crafting the sorts of squelching synth-funk bops (like “All the Way”) that you could easily imagine getting sandwiched between Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” and George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” in a club mix circa 1982—though in Black Bananas’ case, it sounds like the 7″ got cooked in a microwave for 30 seconds before landing on the turntable.
