Photo by Neil Stewart
As we sit down for our virtual chat, Miki Berenyi lets slip that she’s a little hungover. As the former frontwoman of the ‘90s shoegaze turned Britpop darlings Lush, Berenyi was no stranger to a rowdy night out, but this sore head was the result of a more professional occasion. Berenyi was promoting her band Piroshka’s new album Love Drips And Gathers. “We did one of those listening party things on Twitter last night and I can only go on the internet if I have vast quantities of alcohol,” Berenyi explains via Zoom call from her London home as she leans into the laptop screen, casually drawing on her e-cigarette and puffing out billowing clouds of smoke at pertinent moments in the conversation.
Love Drips And Gathers sees Piroshka take a sharp left turn from the raw political post-punk of their debut album Brickbat, opting to explore the reverb drenched outlands of shoegaze and art rock. It is a sound that recalls Lush in their early 90s shoegaze heyday, but according to Berenyi, the coincidence is down to practicality rather than pure nostalgia. “The first album was made before we even signed to Bella Union and so we were kind of self-funding it most of the way and it was a real kind of like, ‘Right we’ve got 10 hours to record four songs, so let’s just crack on and throw everything down.’ With this album we had time to explore the sound a bit and let the songs develop and experiment.”
Where Berenyi is open to nostalgia is in her Baker’s Dozen, which is a whistle-stop tour of the albums that played a prominent role in her early life as a teenaged music obsessive. “You can listen to music throughout your life, but I think there’s something about those teenage years. The first gigs you went to and all of that kind of stuff, that leaves quite a deep imprint on you.”
From stories of lingering outside Broadcasting House with Lush bandmate Emma Anderson to get a peek at her teenage heartthrob Julian Cope, to her time spent hanging out with a host of misfits at Southbank skatepark as a teen, Berenyi’s musical memories are connected to a youthful curiosity and need to carve out an identity that is still with her. “Some of the albums on the list, like The Passions and The Teardrop Explodes, I haven’t played in years. It’s actually quite nice to go back and think, ‘Oh my god I can remember every bloody word. It’s so deeply ingrained.”
Piroshka’s new album Love Drips And Gathers is out now on Bella Union, and they tour the UK in November – find dates here. To begin reading Miki Berenyi’s Baker’s Dozen, click the picture of her below
