The New York group – one of the very best in the US – are back with their first album in nine years. Here, the trio reveal how infighting, illness and anxiety almost destroyed them
Sit Down for Dinner, a record of deftly anxious songs about loss, is among Blonde Redhead’s finest work. In many respects, this is remarkable, given the new record comes after an absence of almost a decade – and after Kazu Makino thought she had “walked away from the band for ever”.
The experience of self-releasing the band’s 2014 album, Barragán, had left the singer and guitarist “decimated, financially and physically”, while long-simmering tensions between Makino and her bandmates, the twin brothers Amedeo (guitar and vocals) and Simone Pace (drums), had grown intolerable. “I kept asking myself: ‘Do I always have to suffer to make music?’”
