The Melbourne-via-LA singer and producer drops a track designed to “make your tongue itch.”
Like many of pop music’s recent great forward thinkers (Danny L Harle, I’m looking at you), the Australian-born Banoffee takes effortlessly infectious melodies and tales of love and lust, then parachutes them into more dangerous surroundings: sonic environments where textures have been warped, synths gargle and vicious bass sounds are turned up to rattle nearby windows.
Unlike those artists, however, Google “Banoffee” and you’ll find yourself lost in endless Deli Smith recipes. Which probably suits the LA-based producer just fine for now – nothing much is given away about her past or identity in the press materials accompanying hyperactive new track ‘Ripe’. “Banoffee started as a lifeboat,” she says in a cryptic statement, “something to hop onto when the real world seemed too dangerous. As the project grew I realised I was no longer stepping onto a lifeboat. I had become the boat and the water.”
‘Ripe’ was written to “make my tongue itch, like when I smell salt and vinegar chips, like grazed knees or sucking lemons” according to the singer, and sure enough balances sweet and sour across its three and a half minutes of PC Music-ish thrills. Combining sugary-sweet verses propelled by a tumbling keyboard motif with dark, bass-heavy choruses full of juttering vocal samples, its this balance that makes ‘Ripe’. Check it out above, out now via 10K Islands.