Banoffee is back. Having dropped her infectious synth bomb Do I Make You Nervous? on her hometown of Melbourne in 2015, before skipping town for a stint in LA, she’s returned to Australia with a bunch of new tricks up her perfectly-hemmed sleeves – the first being the urgent new electronic jam ‘Ripe’, premiered last night on triple j.
Her voice is all dead stops and right angles over glimmering synth, the track throwing up its fair share of surprises throughout as it finds itself punctuated by wonky breakdowns. If it seems like there’s a lot packed into ‘Ripe’s three-minutes-thirty, it’s probably down to how much Banoffee has to say after two years inhabiting a different world.
“Banoffee started as a lifeboat, something to hop onto when the real world seemed too dangerous,” she says. “As the project grew I realised I was no longer stepping onto a lifeboat. I had become the boat and the water. Every aspect of the world I created became an organ that served my machine. This release is the exploration of my new vehicle.
“I wanted to see through Banoffee, dance as it, smell as it. Humanness became irrelevant and melted into some sort of wonky life form. This record is the joining of two bodies; it’s the soundtrack to a process that began with ‘Ninja’ and is now this latest release. I created a world and it ate me. Sort of. Or I ate it. Working in new places forced me to try new techniques and approaches to writing- ripe came out of that.
“I wanted to make something that made my tongue itch like when I smell salt and vinegar chips, like grazed knees or sucking lemons. I’m testing my new machine and ‘Ripe’ is my first reaction.”
If ‘Ripe’ is just the testing phase, we can’t wait to hear what’s next.
‘Ripe’ is out now through Remote Control / 10k Islands
