Bad Bunch

Jennifer Herrema’s Black Bananas return with Bad Bunch, the group’s first album since 2014’s Electric Brick Wall and Herrema’s first release since Royal Trux’s White Stuff (2019). Arriving via Fire Records, the album marks the long-awaited return of Herrema’s iconic vocals alongside longtime collaborators Brian McKinley and Kurt Midness. From Royal Trux to RTX to Black Bananas, Jennifer Herrema’s work has never divided into separate phases so much as continued in motion. As Pitchfork observed, Black Bananas are an “alternate-universe RTX”, absorbing influences from synth-pop, hip-hop, French-touch house and dancehall into their own singular sound. Originally formed over 20 years ago under the name RTX, Herrema, McKinley and Midness have evolved into a kinetically connected, freaky collective. Bad Bunch finds the trio delivering a spaced-out, jazzy-rock groove, shaped by improvisation and new recording methods developed over the last decade. Beginning more than ten years ago, the album took shape across periods of disconnected time, interrupted by the Royal Trux reunion and the upheaval of the pandemic. The result is a record that pushes Black Bananas’ innovative tendencies even further while remaining unmistakably their own.