THE STRIPED BANANAS - Eternity Forest

This time around, Chantelle and Duncan Shepard had no intention of cutting a proper album: the idea was to release a series of singles, recapturing the spirit of their early days. But the sheer volume of material they'd written, combined with the buzz building around the project, convinced the Striped Bananas it made more sense to gather some of the tracks into an album.

"Eternity Forest" is another quirky sequence of naive psychedelic pop ("Magenta Dream"), of interplay between mellotron and slide guitar in Summer of Love mode ("Over The Lily Pads"), but also more ambitious forays into folk-goth territory in the vintage-keyboard-and-ghostly-vocals party that is "Haunted Vortex".

More fragmented but musically weightier, the new album by The Striped Bananas hints at a rock surge on "America's Child", before ratcheting up the intensity with the rough, gritty garage-rock of "Vampire Of Mine".

More vibrant and varied than ever, the songs make room for surf incursions ("Surfer Girls Drive Wicked Cars"), sitar-laced beat digressions ("She Waits For The Sunrise", "Wandering Days"), tracks with backwards tape loops lurking underneath ("Strychnine Wine"), and a melancholy closing ballad ("Mushroom Lullabiese"). Moments that never lose that sense of indolence and irony which keeps the two musicians from ever taking themselves too seriously.

God bless The Striped Bananas, one of the few bands capable of entertaining listeners with a catalogue of ever-enjoyable psychedelic references, and with a set of songs far more intriguing than they might first appear.

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23/03/2026