Mistletone

BLONDE REDHEAD TOUR DATES:

FRIDAY, JUNE 14: MELBOURNE: RISING @ FORUM MELBOURNE with special guest Georgia Knight. tickets on sale here.
SATURDAY, JUNE 15: SYDNEY: CITY RECITAL HALL with special guest Georgia Lines. tickets on sale here.
TUESDAY, JUNE 18: PERTH: THE RECHABITE with special guest Artfool. Tickets on sale here.
THURSDAY, JUNE 20: BRISBANE: OPEN SEASON @ PRINCESS THEATRE with special guest Baby Cool. Tickets on sale here.

Mistletone proudly announces Blonde Redhead’s first Australian tour in over 13 years. The legendary dream-pop band of Kazu Makino and twin brothers Simone + Amedeo Pace returns with their first album in almost a decade, the sumptuously received Sit Down for Dinner. 

This moment finds Blonde Redhead returning to Australia, 30 years since their incandescent debut, and 13 years since their last visit for Laneway Festival. The band brings with them brilliant new music — as perfect an addition as any fan could wish for, to their back catalogue of heady, romantic songs.

Blonde Redhead’s lush contemporary sound – Kazu and Amedeo’s dreamlike vocals floating over a driving, cinematic soundtrack –  has crystallised their stature as “one of the most revered and inventive independent rock bands of the last decade” (Los Angeles Times).

A band who has never stopped pushing forward, Blonde Redhead are celebrated as a classic band of our time, their masterpiece 23 recently named by Pitchfork as one of the Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time.

• “On their first album in nearly a decade, and following a wave of viral resurgence, the NYC avant-rock vets return with their warmest, most welcoming music yet” – PITCHFORK
• “A record of deftly anxious songs about loss … Blonde Redhead’s finest work” – THE GUARDIAN
• MOJO – ★★★★
• THE TIMES – ★★★★
• UNCUT – 8 OUT OF 10
• “Devastatingly gorgeous” – THE LINE OF BEST FIT
• “Blonde Redhead’s first album in nearly a decade is one of their best” – BROOKLYN VEGAN ALBUM OF THE WEEK 

“Life changes fast,” Joan Didion once wrote. “Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

When Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino encountered this passage from Didion’s memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, in the early pandemic months, Makino was thinking of her own parents far away in Japan; the then-lost ritual of congregating for dinner with family; and the heavy, omnipresent feeling that life could change in the instant for any of us. She narrated these feelings on a pair of songs which helped title Blonde Redhead’s 10th full-length: “It’s sort of about death, but the music is so alive and groovy,” Makino says.  

The title Sit Down for Dinner has a separate resonance for the Italian members of Blonde Redhead, the Milan-born twin brothers Amedeo Pace (singer / multi-instrumentalist) and Simone Pace (drummer). “Culturally, dinner is important to us,” Simone says of the non-negotiable family ritual. “It’s a moment for us to sit down and have time with each other. We grew up that way. I know a lot of people eat and run, eat in front of their TV, or don’t care about it too much — and that’s OK — but we really do.” 

Dinner has long been a sacred ritual for Blonde Redhead as a band as well; when they’re on tour or rehearsing, they always share a meal, no matter what. Sit Down for Dinner is a meticulous and immersive testament to the unique internal logic Blonde Redhead have refined over their three-decade existence, characterised by that sense of persistent togetherness.

Formed in 1993, after leaving their homelands of Japan and Italy, Blonde Redhead quickly found a place in the New York indie underground. Their early releases on Smells Like (Steve Shelley’s label), Touch & Go and 4AD, traced an arc from angular indie-rock to cosmopolitan art pop. The trio might have been a quintessential ’90s band, if not for the fact that they continuously kept going, growing, never confined to any era but the present.

Sit Down for Dinner is charged with the inescapable struggles of adulthood: communication breakdown in enduring relationships, wondering which way to turn, holding onto your dreams. Fittingly, Sit Down for Dinner is a pleasure, with the ease of new conversation among familiar friends.

Crucial to that equation are Blonde Redhead’s innate harmonic sensibilities, which Kazu calls the core of the band. “We have a language we have kept,” she adds. “We try to change rhythms, concepts, and sounds. But that harmonic sensibility has stayed the same. It hits the same part of your heart.”