A Shoegaze Great, Back in the Stars

It takes around 70 seconds before Oliver Cherer and I start chatting about the seagulls. They nest in the roof of his home in Hastings, a coastal town abutting the English Channel, and every solo album he’s recorded had their birdsong on it, too, whether he aimed for it or not. But now the musician and producer has a very organized, properly insulated studio, where he and his two bandmates recorded songs for their recent album Tripla. In the background of the Zoom, where the light streams into the studio in a muted, very British seaside grey-blue, there are no chirps to be heard. “Yeah, we don’t need seagull sounds on these Miki Berenyi Trio records,” he says.  

Aesthetically, perhaps not, but philosophically, the seagulls could work. Tripla, the debut album by the Miki Berenyi Trio, is a timely meditation on the state of everything, documenting big doomsday topics like the climate crisis and more day-to-day yet still-consequential tremors: virulent misogyny gone viral, generalized anxiety, the shifting nature of love and loss, and the experience of getting older and wondering, quite seriously, What the fuck? Cherer plays bass, KJ “Moose” McKillop is on guitar, and Miki Berenyi, icon of ethereal rock, sings and plays guitar, with drum machines backing their tracks. Immersive and moody, Tripla pulls the trick that Berenyi often does with her music, whether in her shoegaze-defining ’90s band Lush or more recently in the dream-pop supergroup Piroshka: the album submerges its intelligent, often very serious lyrics in sumptuous, fuzzy guitar dreaminess, putting you in a state of vertigo you’re actually happy to experience. Tripla even has a song called “Vertigo” that does exactly that—a song about sleeplessness with a starry electronic twinkle that sounds like levitating inside a planetarium.