For Blonde Redhead, Intentionality is Everything

Glimmering in the light, Kazu Makino sits on a patio filled with cozy outdoor furniture. A soft breeze ruffles her long, copper-dyed hair as she cuddles a small dog. Her purple bikini absorbs the filtering sun. I’ve never seen someone actually emanate serenity through a Zoom screen before. Twin brothers Amedeo and Simone Pace flank her in their little virtual boxes, all three calling in from distinct locales and times zones. Linen-shirted Amedeo reclines in a small, overgrown garden, shrouded in late-afternoon sun. Simone sits half-obscured in a dark kitchen, eyes trailing thoughtfully across the screen. These are the three minds behind Blonde Redhead, the mid ‘90s and early aughts alt-rock trio who just released their first album in nine years (since 2014’s Barragán) last Friday. Even if you don’t think you know them, you probably do: “For the Damaged Coda,” the eerie finale of 2000’s Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, went viral as the theme song for Rick and Morty’s Evil Morty character and rose to meme-ified fame 20 years after its initial release. Blonde Redhead was reborn in the zeitgeist, though not as they deserved to be.

It’s funny how that always seems to happen to the bands whose songs are the most intentional and the best thought out. And really, that’s the only word to describe Blonde Redhead: intentional, and sometimes devastatingly so. Theirs is a sound whose every angle is examined, every dark corner scoured. Sit Down For Dinner, Amedeo explains, is the culmination of a decades-long effort to speed up their creative processes. Still, the LP is a five-year labor of persistence and resilience, a psychedelic rumination around the void of isolation the world fell into during the pandemic’s first months. Following a spurt of creativity nursed in the brooding melancholy of those sickly days, the band floated in labelless purgatory for another year before they felt comfortable signing their work into the hands of section1—a teensy, toddler-aged venture working out of L.A. “We wanted to not feel like we had put our destiny in somebody else’s hands,” Makino explains with composed sincerity. “So we waited.”

It’s a hard-earned patience that the three share, the kind that accompanies 30 years of music making amidst a constant ebb and flow of creative divergences and spatiotemporal rifts. The ‘90s underground indie scene is not, at a glance, conducive to the sort of generation-crossing, genre-spanning work Blonde Redhead has tirelessly churned out since 1995. The group’s continued existence is just as purposeful as their work itself, an active and ever-shifting effort to come together and create.

As the world fell silent in 2020, Makino made the decision to flee with Amedeo and his partner to upstate New York, where the two channeled a devastating lack of external stimuli into some of their richest sonic and lyrical work yet. Alone in the cold March suburbia, Makino perused Joan Didion’s magnum opus, The Year of Magical Thinking. The tome is itself a reflection on ending and continuation of life, the cycles of existence we all witness and undergo. When Didion’s husband and writing partner John Gregory Dunne died in 2003, her world crumpled into an enormous, hungry nothing. She wrote The Year of Magical Thinking to track her evolution through grief, coming to understand the absence which would now define her life. In a seminal moment in the memoir, Dunne sits down to dine with his wife. He never stands back up. “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends,” Didion writes, a sentiment which Makino and the brothers worked to mold and soften into a sweetly profound meditation on isolation and togetherness.

And yet, “this is not a COVID record,” Simone enunciates, his voice clear and insistent. The group had been tooling at new music since 2018, trying to find an angle to swoop in on and a voice to hold on to. And then, Sit Down for Dinner came along. The album is, then, quietly philosophical at its core. It is a reflection on mortality and aging, on love and loss, on the way the self is stretched and corroded as you enter middle age. “It has the right space, the right amount of air; it moves. I think what it is is it’s really close to home,” Makino exhales gently. “So often you have a little distance [between] the self and the music. Once you find something like that, you feel honest about what you make. You don’t want to lose that.”