Blonde Redhead

‘Life changes fast,’ Joan Didion once wrote, ’Life changes in the instant. You sit down and life as you know it ends’. It is that passage from Didion's mourning memoir, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’, read by Bonde Redhead singer and multi-instrumentalist Kazu Makino in 2020. The words touch Makino. They remind her of her parents far away in Japan, the lack of eating together with family and the heavy, ever-present feeling that life can indeed change just like that. Makino turned those feelings into two songs, ‘Sit Down for Dinner Pt I’ and ‘Sit Down for Dinner Pt II’, which immediately gave the title to Blonde Redhead's latest album. ‘Sit Down for Dinner’ became a record where togetherness as well as wrestling with The Things of Life jump off. Sparkling grooves, poetic lyrics and compelling experimentation alternate. Blonde Redhead may have been around for 32 years, but with this tenth album, the band proves they are still making music that resonates with the times we live in. ‘We have a language we have kept,’ says Makino, ’We try to change rhythms, concepts, and sounds. But that harmonic sensibility has stayed the same. It hits the same part of your heart’.