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.

I Zoom with the trio—MB3, as they call themselves—on an overcast day in February, the kind of day where you want their music to envelop you in its transportive jangle to match the atmosphere. Cherer’s in his studio, Moose and Berenyi are together in London on adjacent chairs, and the band’s chemistry is immediately apparent: Cherer as the down-to-earth dreamer, Moose as the acerbically funny cynic, and Berenyi as the dry, charismatic voice, crystallized her 2022 memoir Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success. (If you haven’t read it, you must; I rank it among John Lurie’s The History of Bones and Patti Smith’s Just Kids as the best musician memoirs out.) 

As it happens, MB3 is a creation borne of the memoir. While Berenyi was on tour for the book, which chronicles the way her fraught and abusive family circumstances shaped her into adulthood as well as the formation of Lush, she was asked to play music alongside her talks. Untempted by the solo experience, she brought along Cherer and her longtime partner (and childrens’ father) Moose to play some Lush songs for the occasion. “I remember Moose playing some of the guitar parts and going, ‘You don’t have to copy what’s on the Lush records, just do whatever feels comfortable,’” she says. “Like, let’s make it ours in whatever form that takes, rather than trying to repeat something from the past. That kind of fed into the MB3 thing of, let’s not try and pretend to be something that we’re not.”

MB3 might have a lightly Lushy vibe—Berenyi’s voice is Berenyi’s voice, always airy and reaching for the cosmos, and the guitars float, overdriven and processed, as though beaming in from a fantastical plane—but their ingenuity is contemporary and urgent. The group bears Berenyi’s name but Tripla is written collectively, with each member bringing songs to the group and letting them blossom from there. “Ollie is a really good catalyst,” Berenyi says of Cherer, “because when he brings a song to the table, he's just like, ‘I don't care what you do with it. Change whatever you want.’ No ego.” 

Moose wrote some lyrics with Miki’s voice in mind, aware “that it would have to sound credible coming from her point of view.” One of these, “8th Deadly Sin,” kicks off the album, a catchy whorl of fuzzy guitar-pop about the lack of seasons and honeybees in the death-spiraling Anthropocene. “Climate breakdown is the biggest thing that anybody should be waking up screaming about,” says Moose. “But the idea that you set a song in the future—50 or 100 years hence, with a woman looking and thinking, what the fuck happened, and who's going to take the blame for this—and just possibly blaming men. I mean, really!”

Here, Berenyi interjects. “That’s quite interesting, because that’s not how I think at all. That’s absolutely Moose’s worldview in that song! But I suspect if we were writing all these songs 30 years ago, we’d have a different view. If I was younger, I would probably have a will to change the world, right? But now the songs are actually quite defeatist—a bit like, ‘Well, this is the way the fucking world is, because I've been on this planet 57 years, and it hasn't bloody changed in terms of women. They’re an exploration of that feeling, as older people who have fucking seen it all: How are we going to navigate through this and not get overwhelmed completely by despair?”

She’s referring to songs like “Big I Am” and “Gango,” which address the crisis of misogyny on the internet and in real life, but she also touches on the way artists evolve and shift as they age and refine their craft. In “Kinch,” a dreamy journey into Berenyi’s upper range over synths that sound like church bells, she seems to explore the topic of memory and how a person’s perspective changes as they grow. So what does it mean when you spent your youth in a band big enough to have played the first Lollapalooza—the only women on that bill, by the way, and by her memoir’s account a real tête-à-tête with rank sexism—and by middle age you’re back on the indie circuit doing things your own way, for yourself, for the love of it?

“With Lush, I was never particularly interested in that narrative of like, oh, one day we'll be playing stadiums. But you want your music to mean something, so of course, you play the game. There is this idea that you’re climbing something, and that you’ll end up with some kind of influence,” Berenyi says. “At this age, I’m not totally giving up the ghost, but you end up doing it because you’re in the moment, more so than when I was, like, 25. I might not even fucking be alive by the time we do the next record. It just has to mean something and be enjoyable at the time. And that can be a tiny gig in Hull to 120 people, or it can be a new song that everybody rehearses and gets a real kick out of.”

“There’s no massive target at all,” Moose concurs. “It’s just trying to keep your head above the rising tide of steaming shit that’s sort of building up around us.” Still, Tripla’s dreamy atmosphere and moody lyrics are rooted in an uptempo brightness—basically every song is dancey in its way, too, a kind of appropriate dissonance where you can stomp around to a song about how Andrew Tate is a toxin. “Look, the world is shit, you know, but we fucking carry on. We dance, we make something beautiful, we create a community,” says Berenyi. “That sounds a bit hippie but there’s a hopeful spirit behind the record, however dour certain lyrics might be.”

I mention Berenyi’s countercultural origins—she and Lush’s Emma Anderson were making zines in London’s ’80s punk scene before they formed their band—and wonder if it’s better going back to the roots of independence. “Everything is DIY,” confirms Cherer. “There’s no crew. We drive to a show in a car with all our gear, we take turns driving, and it’s DIY at every point, down to the videos, really. Do a little of this, do a little of that. It’s hard to juggle, but it’s a nice way to live.” 

More and more, as both a listener and a critic, I search for the person behind a piece of music—that connection that puts a song beyond something lovely to listen to and represents the humanity of its makers. Maybe it’s the proliferation of AI, or the division being sown among people around the world, but if I can find the humanness, the art feels deeper. Miki Berenyi has been imparting this kind of humanness for more than 40 years, and the Trio has conveyed it on Tripla, too. It’s the notion that even if everything’s fucked, you can still live life on your own terms—and sound beautiful doing it.