Opaque Red Vinyl limited to 1000 copies
Departing from the ultra-slick bursts of sunshine pop and afrobeat that defined their 2020 debut The True Story of Bananagun, the Australian five-piece return to muddy the waters with a heavy blend of incendiary jazz and freak-beat experimentation. It’s Bananagun alright, but braver, bolder and more mysterious than ever.
“It was all attitude towards life and esoteric stuff, natural law, how energy transfers, sounds, chemistry between people”, explains Nick Van Bakel, Bananagun’s songwriter/vocalist/guitarist/flautist, about the tracking process. Recorded at Button Pusher studios in Melbourne, the approach was about fostering "an environment together where we can make some magic, capture the phenomena of energy and soundwaves interacting with each other in the room. That was definitely what we wanted it to sound like - pro-human.”
While it’s by no means a pessimistic work, the album is a product of a climate of upheaval and, for Van Bakel, a period of great personal change. “I had a myriad of mountains to be crossed which was pretty challenging”, he explains. “So I just cocooned into lots of spiritual side quests and soul seeking”.
All of the songs featured on WITCOTS? were jammed out, written and recorded in batches of two-a-week across the space of a month. It was a case of: learn the song on Monday, record on Wednesday; rinse and repeat. So, when the needle drops on the scorching-hot freak-beat of opener ‘Brave Child of a New World’, what you’re hearing is a lighter-spark moment of a song coming into life for the very first time - energised by all the bleeds, blemishes and imperfections of a collective playing and moving together as one soul.