This marks a big change for what’s happening right now for 2025. A sound which has beauty, dynamics, and imaginative dreamy-pop that’s waiting for us like a flower waiting to unveil its true identity. The new band is called the Miki Berenyi Trio. It’s a mixture of shoegazed form in its arrangements, melancholic beats, and electronic music that’ll take you back to the 1990s and early 2000s when bands like Radiohead and of course Goldfrapp were just getting started.
The trio’s debut album Tripla, released on the Bella Union label, is one of those albums that is like a breath of fresh air, giving its awesome form of power to be explored across the heavens. Miki Berenyi has made a name for herself when she was in a band called Lush which released three studio albums (Spooky, Split, and Lovelife) from 1992 to 1996, followed by an EP entitle Scar.
And of course, Piroshka which released two studio albums (Brickbat and Love Drips and Gathers) from 2019 to 2021. The album title Tripla is taken from the mother tongue of Miki’s father, Tripla is Hungarian for ‘triple’. Alongside Miki Berenyi, the line-up considers two guitarists; KJ “Moose” McKillop from ‘90s shoegazing band Moose who is Berenyi’s life partner, and Oliver Cherer.
When you listen to Tripla, you get a sense of meditated guidance in which the band have put listeners into this spiritual atmosphere in the way they have shown evidence behind tracks ‘8th Deadly Sin’, the Kraftwerk-like nod which speaks of Autobahn and Radio-Activity with a late ‘60s garage rock attitude with ‘Kinch’, and the electronic future detailing on what’s to come in the years to come on ‘Vertigo’.
Once we go into the film-noir bass intro attitude for ‘Gango’, you begin to think of the THRAK-era from King Crimson that comes right off the bat, but it becomes this action-packed synthesized arrangement as Miki’s slithering vocals begins to climb upwards to the buildings searching for more clues the killer has left behind. The electronic popping effects behind ‘A Different Girl’ makes it a deep, dark, cavernous turned uplifting hope of things to come to see a bright light at the end of the tunnel.
Now we’re getting funky all of a sudden, a-la wah-wah effects! ‘Big I Am’ is Miki going into this ‘70s funk, foot-stomping attitude that’ll reach the heavens nonstop. Those shuffling grooves with its Leslie speaker form and the Syd Barrett-era of Pink Floyd’s keyboards, closing the piece in this fading scenery while ‘Hurricane’ adds in those darker effects with a tidal-waving attack.
Miki channels Blondie on this track, honoring Deborah Harry’s arrangements and of course Elastica that comes to mind when it comes to the post-punk format. And Miki herself has done her homework very well by going into the full-scale assault with its widescreen format to travel deeper into the jungle in the hottest part of the summer with its dance-like vibration.
And its back to the funk-rock orientations once more as the trio imagines themselves writing a score to the ‘70s Blaxploitation films such as Superfly, Foxy Brown, Coffy, and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song with Curtis Mayfield handling the production levels behind ‘Manu’. Speaking of Mayfield, Miki honors the soul legend as if they’re continuing where ‘Freddie’s Dead’ had left off on ‘Manu’.
Closing off Tripla is the calypso, under-watery voyages turned string quartet finale of ‘Ubique’. It’s a Latin word for ‘Everywhere’. Here, the trio head home in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and be free from all of the chaos on the surface with its joyful and dreamy orientation to get our spirits up and rise once more to walk into Goldfrapp’s territory with mind-blowing results that Miki has endured.
