Jennifer Herrema’s Black Bananas return with Bad Bunch, the group’s first album since 2014’s Electric Brick Wall and Herrema’s first release since Royal Trux’s White Stuff in 2019. Assembled across more than a decade, the record arrives September 4th via Fire Records (their first for the label), with lead single “Turkey Burgers” out now.

From Royal Trux to RTX to Black Bananas, Jennifer Herrema’s work has never divided into separate phases so much as continued in motion. The long-awaited return of Jennifer Herrema’s iconic vocals with her equally enigmatic group Black Bananas, now a three-piece band with Brian McKinley and Kurt Midness, arrives as an alternate-reality, spaced-out, jazzy-rock groove about limited menu items.

These three musicians first started their collaboration over 20 years ago under the name RTX (Herrema’s first post–Royal Trux band project) and are now a kinetically connected, freaky collective that busts through the algorithmic consciousness of the modern music ecosystem.

Bad Bunch began over a decade ago, with a pause in the middle that allowed for a Royal Trux reunion, resulting in the 2019 album White Stuff. In 2020, the lockdown disrupted the band’s working rhythm and led to the loss of their recording studio they had called home since her long running project’s inception. Since letting the studio go, the band has developed new ways of recording, emphasising improvisation as a central tool in shaping the rest of the album. “Turkey Burgers” highlights the band’s innovative tendencies, which have made them a standout presence within Herrema’s remarkable discography.

“‘Turkey Burgers’ was one of the first new songs we wrote for the album. It dates back to when we had our own studio and would regularly work on music together. Since the pandemic, we had to adjust and develop some new methods for making music,” says Herrema. “I think it’s a part of the process that has led to some interesting new sounds for us. We paired down with some new methods. We are really happy you will finally hear it when we get to share these adaptations on Bad Bunch. It’s still Black Bananas so you can hear a progression.”

“Every time we opened the sessions was different and like the universe expanding so did the tracks and the density of the combinations. It’s really cool to revisit and expand,” says Herrema. “We went about constructing over periods of disconnected time—that was the work. We knew it was done when, after shaping it for so long, there was suddenly this completed fully formed record sitting in front of us……it’s totally done when the magic is real.”