Black Bananas return with 'Bad Bunch,' their first album in a decade, out September 4 via Fire Records

BLACK BANANAS RETURN WITH BAD BUNCH, THEIR FIRST NEW ALBUM IN A DECADE OUT SEPT 4TH VIA FIRE RECORDS NEW SINGLE "TURKEY BURGERS" OUT NOW

Photo by Bunny Biskit

“Absorbing modern influences like synth-pop, hip-hop, French-touch house and dancehall.”

“Uniquely decadent”

“Black Bananas excel at making music that bares its fangs and claws in an expression somewhere between a snarl and a smile.” “Herrema is considered rock royalty and remains utterly unique: a genuine star who somehow makes the very idea of rock’n’roll seem tangible.”

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. LISTEN TO "TURKEY BURGERS" From Royal Trux to RTX to Black Bananas, Jennifer Herrema’s work has never divided into separate phases so much as continued in motion. As HERO Magazine observed, she has been “surfing the Rad Times Xpress for three decades” a trajectory defined less by reinvention than by sustained evolution. 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." Bad Bunch is available on digital and CD formats, with a standard red LP and a yellow and black banana splatter indie edition (pictured below). PRE-ORDER BAD BUNCH

Black Bananas Bad Bunch Release Date: September 4, 2026 Fire Records

Tracklist: 1. Nutrageous & Jam 2. All The Way 3. Dust Of Ages 4. Eddie’s Album 5. Cold Bussin 6. Outta My Head 7. Sherman Dealer 8. Turkey Burgers 9. Tiny Chewbacca 10. Good Pass

Photo by Bunny Biskit

ABOUT BLACK BANANAS: Jennifer Herrema is the artist behind Royal Trux, RTX, and Black Bananas…projects that have reshaped the language of rock, noise, pop, and underground music since the late 1980s. Her work moves as a single evolving system rather than a sequence of disconnected bands: disruptive, recombinant, and resistant to easy containment. Raised in Southeast Washington, D.C., Herrema came up within overlapping worlds of DIY hardcore, hip-hop, go-go, and heavy guitar music, absorbing sound and image through out her childhood before relocating to New York city as a teenager. Early Royal Trux recordings emerged as instinctive collage—fragments of American musical mythology assembled with cheap equipment, restless curiosity, and an indifference to expectation. Black Bananas is also a deeply lived-in collaborative unit. Brian McKinley, an extremely agile & chameleon capable guitarist, connected with Herrema in Southern California in the early 2000s through mutual ties to Richard Kern’s Black Snakes, while also working across electronic-leaning mutual ties to Richard Kern’s Black Snakes, while also working across electronic-leaning projects including the DFA-affiliated NonStop with DJ Johnny Basil. Kurt Midness entered through New York’s underground rock scene, playing bass in Bad Wizard before the band joined RTX’s 2005 Transmaniacon European tour—where Herrema met him at the first show in Amsterdam. Together, Herrema, McKinley, and Midness formed a core unit built on shared history, instinct, and real-time construction rather than fixed roles or static compositions. As Herrema has described Black Bananas, it is “an ultimate shape-shifting vehicle… just as much about performance, real-time creation, and visual art as it is specific tracks or songs.” With Bad Bunch (2026, Fire Records), the first Black Bananas album since 2014’s Electric Brick Wall, Herrema extends that trajectory with a record assembled across more than a decade of work that continued through interruption, touring, reassembly, and ongoing movement. Work began in 2015 and remained active rather than set aside, revisited and reshaped across time. Rather than unfolding in a single arc, Bad Bunch accumulated form through process. Songs were treated as source—cut apart, repositioned, rebuilt, and allowed to shift shape over time, forming through tension, layering, and return rather than fixed resolution. Black Bananas is not a new direction. It is the current state of a system that has been in motion all along. # # # For more information on Black Bananas, please visit: Instagram | Spotify