Oct 22, 2026 · 3h 3m
Black Bananas turn creative accidents into an artistic life
The Best New Music of Summer 2026 With Patrik Sandberg. Plus, an Interview With Jennifer Herrema and Kurt Midness of Black Bananas.
The episode connects a wide-ranging summer music survey to a deeper argument for evolving beyond genre, commercial cycles, and inherited rules.
- 1The summer’s strongest music crosses electroclash, shoegaze, dance-punk, Americana, and experimental rock without settling into one identity.
- 2Black Bananas’ Bad Bunch grew through improvisation, archival fragments, physical formats, and years of allowing songs to mature.
- 3The interview argues that sustaining an authentic artistic life matters more than chasing scale, polish, or conventional measures of success.
Don't miss
Kurt Midness explains how archival material, accidental discoveries, and physical-only tracks became part of Black Bananas’ Bad Bunch.
The brief
Yasi Salek and Patrick Sandberg reject the idea of an objective “best” and build a summer 2026 survey around artists whose identities exceed easy genre labels.
The rundown moves from electroclash, hyperpop, and shoegaze to raw rock, dance-punk, Americana, cold-wave, and experimental pop, favoring distinctive sensibilities over polished sameness.
Black Marble, Ceremony, Afghan Whigs, Black Bananas, and Dinosaur Jr. anchor a broader case for bands that preserve a recognizable voice while continuing to change.
In the interview, Black Bananas explain how improvisation, old recordings, samples, food titles, physical editions, and creative accidents shaped Bad Bunch over years.
Kurt Midness and Jennifer Herrema ultimately frame art as a way of organizing life: sustain the practice, resist imagined rules, and make work for its own reasons.
Books & mentions
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