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Apr 21, 2025 Web Exclusive By Andy Von Pip Photography by Sébastien Faits-Divers and Abbey Raymonde

One of the first things that strikes you about Tripla, the debut album from Miki Berenyi Trio, is its distinctive, layered sense of rhythm.

“Yeah. Well, that’s because we haven’t got a drummer,” laughs Miki Berenyi—former singer/guitarist in ’90s shoegaze legends Lush—backstage at Rough Trade Records, Liverpool, where she’s joined by her partner in both life and music, Moose (K.J. McKillop of fellow ’90s shoegazers, also named Moose), and bandmate Oliver Cherer.

“We just embraced not having a drummer—and the idea that we can program what we want,” Moose explains. “Make it sound like there are two drummers and a percussionist, or whatever. You know, honestly, there’s no limitations on that at all.”

Their appreciation for electronic textures plays a central role too, with Moose adding, “I’ve always listened to a lot of electronic music, Ollie has too, so that was always in the air.”

For Cherer, the roots run deep: “That’s kind of what I made in the ’90s, electronic music and…it feels like a dirty word now, but, you know, Big Beat, all that stuff,” he grins. “There was a moment in about 2000 where suddenly it felt like you had to stop doing it.”

The heady mix of electronics and guitars forms the core of a richly imaginative and emotionally charged strain of dream pop, euphoric yet melancholic, politically sharp yet deeply personal, fronted by Berenyi’s instantly recognizable voice.

It all started almost by accident. As Berenyi and Moose’s previous band, Piroshka, slowly drifted apart, with everyone pursuing different projects, Berenyi began working on Fingers Crossed, her critically acclaimed memoir released in 2022. That opened the door to a string of bookshop signings and Q&A sessions.

Moose picks up the story: “Miki was being asked to play a few songs at these signings, and rather than do an acoustic thing, it seemed like a good idea to put together a little mini band. The first time, it was just three or four Lush songs Miki had written, and we programmed some simple beats. It was pretty sparse—still dreamy, though.”

“It was more of a gesture, really,” Berenyi adds.

What began as the two of them, joined by Cherer to play a few Lush covers and some Piroshka tracks, quickly took on a life of its own. Simon Raymonde, head of Piroshka’s label Bella Union (and a former member of Cocteau Twins), who had hosted one of the book Q&As, was particularly encouraging. He suggested they record some of the Lush covers. “Because they were different, you know,” Berenyi explains. “I told Moose, ‘You don’t have to play what Emma played. We’re not trying to recreate things note-for-note. Just enjoy it,’” she remembers saying, referring to her former Lush bandmate Emma Anderson.

As things progressed, the trio were offered festival slots—but there was a catch. “They wanted a full set,” Berenyi says. “And I wasn’t about to do a whole set of fucking Lush songs. So we reached a point where we had to expand the set, and that’s when we started writing new material. It actually reminded me of the early Lush days, when we didn’t have enough songs for a 40-minute set and had to throw in a few covers.”

“There were probably four or five Lush songs in the set at one point,” she continues. “A couple of Piroshka tracks too, but they gradually got edged out by the new stuff. The songs that ended up on the album started taking over—we’d been playing some of them for quite a while by then.”

The first songs, such as “Vertigo” and “Hurricane”—the latter, which started out as more of a garage track and then over time morphed into something completely different—caught Raymonde’s ear again. “I remember early on, when we had added a few more tunes, Simon said, ‘You should record these tunes, as an EP,’” says Cherer. “I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, but maybe we’d need an album, though.’”

The trio have certainly put in the miles when it comes to playing live, and their setup now is far leaner than it ever was with Piroshka. As Berenyi explains: “Yeah with Piroshka we tried to do too much, it was a big set-up, six of us on stage and we did it the old-fashioned way. Book time, record an album, play a few dates, and then it’s all over. This time we’ve done it the other way round, playing loads of dates.”

“And we keep using the word nimble,” adds Moose. “But we are pretty nimble. You know, all our gear, just the three of us, we can fit into a big car.”

Tripla was recorded in what Cherer laughingly describes as “essentially two garden sheds,” a setup that speaks to the lo-fi, hands-on approach they took. “It does feel really DIY,” he adds, “and it’s amazing what you can do with new technology in terms of recording.”

Still, you’d be forgiven for assuming Tripla was recorded in a high-end studio, decked out with all the bells and whistles. The sound is lush (no pun intended), cinematic, and a beguiling blend of shoegaze guitars and hypnotic, danceable electronic pulses. Lyrically, it oscillates between the deeply personal and the broadly universal. “Big I Am,” for example, tackles toxic online influencers like Andrew Tate and the so-called “manosphere”—a topic that feels especially timely in light of recent conversations around the Netflix series Adolescence.

“We watched all four episodes in one evening and I had nightmares,” Moose reveals. “The next day I woke up and felt so depressed.”

“At the risk of being out of step, I didn’t really rate it,” adds Cherer. “My main issue is that by making it all about what this boy consumes online in his bedroom at night, the show strips away any wider context, like other influences, it removes it from reality.”

“I actually thought it was really good,” counters Berenyi. “Flawed, sure, but there were some brilliant moments, like a David Mamet play in places. It’s a conversation worth having, but what amazes me is that the biggest cultural response, and the bulk of the discussion, is about how all this affects boys. When actually, the impact on girls is way, way worse.

“So ‘Big I Am’ is more about that, the impact this stuff has on girls. The exasperation that someone like Andrew Tate can preach toxic nonsense and still get airtime. Or that Russell Brand can swan around, rebranding himself as fucking Jesus the Messiah, and people actually buy it. Now he’s been charged with rape, and of course his defence is that it’s just ‘the woke mob’ ganging up on him. Men can’t be men anymore, blah blah.

“I mean, what fucking does my head in about this whole manosphere or whatever the fuck it’s called is it’s so one-sided,” she continues. “It’s so like, ‘We want this and we want that and men used to be able to be men and women should stay in the kitchen.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, but do you understand that if you want to go back to that, that means that you are solely responsible for the total family income, right? You will have to just keep these women and children paid for and raised off your own fucking work, right? And you reckon you’ll still have time to be sitting around on your arse watching fucking bollocks on YouTube all day?’ And it’s that kind of one-sided thing. Just wanting to cherry-pick the bits of masculinity that suit you and not take on board the fact that there are no jobs that pay enough for you to support an entire family on your own. And if you can’t you’ll be judged a failure. ”

Writing lyrics that are deeply personal and reflect the world around them is clearly important to the trio. However, Berenyi has previously said she doesn’t want to sound like “somebody’s granny” lecturing people.

“What’s interesting about writing lyrics,” she explains, “is that sometimes I start off thinking, ‘God, this particular subject fucking annoys me,’ and I’ll begin writing about it. But then I spiral, because I realize, ‘Well, I don’t fucking have the answers.’ And that ends up becoming part of the song too.”

The album explores a broad range of themes. “8th Deadly Sin,” written by Moose, addresses the climate crisis. “Yeah, that’s a huge issue for me,” he says.

“I tend to write from a slightly convoluted angle because I know Miki’s going to be the one singing the song, not me, so I try to find a different perspective. But yeah, I do think the climate crisis isn’t being taken anywhere near as seriously as it should be. Over the last year, it feels like it’s slipped down the agenda.

“And now,” he continues, “we’ve got a new government backtracking on things you thought were finally going to be implemented. Look at the ultra-low emission zone in London, I mean, it’s already scientifically proven that air quality in London has improved by 40%.”

“It’s a no-brainer,” Berenyi agrees. “It’s massive. We come from a generation that remembers when having one car was a big deal—like, ‘Wow, fuck me, you’ve got a car!’ Now families have three or four.”

Elsewhere on the album, Berenyi explores themes of loss and grief, for example in the deeply affecting track “Kinch,” which reflects on the idea that when you lose someone, they never fully leave you. The song was released alongside a stunning black-and-white cinematic video directed by Sébastien Faits-Divers.

“Do you know what triggered it?” she recalls. “I’d had a particularly bad night, was really hungover, and the next morning I looked in the mirror and thought, ‘Fuck me, that’s my dad.’ Not just an old woman staring back at me—it was a fucking old man. But it got me thinking about how we remember people who are gone.”

Those people include Chris Acland, the former drummer in Lush who tragically took his own life in 1996, which contributed to the initial breakup of Lush.

“After writing the book and revisiting memories of Chris, my dad, and others—bringing them back to life on the page—it made me think about how people talk about loss,” Berenyi continues. “They’ll say things like, ‘Oh, my mother was a saint,’ and speak about the person in these completely glowing terms. But I don’t see it like that.

“Even when I think about Chris, I still remember all the fucking things that annoyed me about him. And I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want him to become Saint Chris. You know what I mean? That’s how you hold on to the whole person, it’s the same with my dad.”

The video for “Kinch,” shot in Dijon, France, looks like a high-budget production, but it was made very much in line with the band’s DIY ethos.

“When we played Paris Popfest the summer before last, my friend Christophe introduced us to Sébastien, who’s filmed all our videos so far,” Moose explains. “He goes to loads of gigs and captures them brilliantly. When I looked at his work, I was blown away. He’s got cameras all over the stage, lights everything beautifully, edits it all himself, it’s all really tasteful, honestly. And he’s just a lovely guy.”

“He is,” Berenyi agrees. “He’d already done ‘Vertigo,’ ‘8th Deadly Sin,’ and ‘Big I Am.’ When we wanted to do something for ‘Kinch,’ I said to Séb, ‘Maybe I should just jump on the Eurostar to France, film for a day or so, and then go home.’ I mean, it’s mad what you can do now. I think about what people used to spend on videos—[Lush’s] ‘Hypocrite’ probably cost about 80 fucking grand. We literally hired an entire fairground! It was crazy money, wasn’t it? I remember talking to Pulp, and I think ‘This Is Hardcore’ cost about 500 grand. Even ‘Common People’—I remember saying to [Pulp’s] Steve Mackey, ‘How much did that cost?’ and he said something like, ‘The price of a house.’”

“It was the last days of Rome,” laughs Moose. “It really was, that early to mid-’90s period, just into the 2000s. Because the internet was coming over the fucking horizon, and it was about to kick the shit out of the whole thing. And it has. I can’t see it ever coming back like that.”

For the Miki Berenyi Trio, there’s definitely a sense of making a virtue out of necessity. With limited resources, they’ve had to consider every part of the process carefully, from recording to planning the tour.

“Mind you, this is the best fun I’ve ever had,” says Moose. “Really, genuinely. No arguments, no shenanigans. We all get on. We’ve got a system that works.”

“I still get asked, ‘Do you think Lush will ever reform?’” adds Berenyi. “But I always say no, because I don’t talk to Emma and Phil [King], and they don’t talk to me. Of course, if we were all fucking great friends, it would be far easier to reform Lush. We’d be playing venues five times the size, with a crew, tour managers, and a label. But that’s not an option. So then you think, ‘Well, we’ll do something else,’ and you make the absolute best of what you’re doing. And it does feel like a bit of a liberation.

“Because I know full well what it would be like if I were still in Lush. Even without the personal issues, just the pressure of being that band, playing the music you played, it would be a very different experience.

“It was great, and I’m glad I did it for that one reunion tour,” Berenyi says. “But I don’t know if I’d want to keep doing it for the next five or ten years, or however long it’s been. I really wanted to get beyond just playing. I mean, I know it’s lucrative—Slowdive, Ride, they’ve all reformed, and good luck to them. But I can see how that can become its own trap. Members put out solo records, and while they do okay, they’ll never match what the main band does. But, understandably, they still feel the need to do it.”

“Mind you,” Cherer chimes in, “Slowdive have definitely avoided the nostalgia thing. They’ve completely turned things around, haven’t they?”

“They’ve earned the respect they didn’t get before,” he adds, referring to the harsh treatment the band received in the ’90s from the press.

“They were really badly treated,” Moose reflects. “They were so young, and it was totally unnecessary. They got a constant beating from the music papers. It’s amazing they’re back, and now, if you ask younger people about shoegaze, they think Slowdive are bigger than My Bloody Valentine.”

From the start, avoiding becoming a heritage act or a mini Lush tribute band was something the trio were very aware of when they began writing their own music.

“We may have started by doing Lush covers,” Moose admits, “but from the very beginning, we were clear that we didn’t want to be stuck there. Once we started writing, the momentum built naturally, and it became obvious where we were headed. Now, we know there’s going to be a second album—and a third. We’re just really enjoying the process, so why stop now?”

www.mikiberenyitrio.bandcamp.com

www.instagram.com/berenyi_miki/

Read our 2015 interview with Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson of Lush on Lovelife and the final days of the band.

Read our 2015 interview with Lush on Split.

Read our 2016 interview with Lush on their reunion.

Read our 2024 interview with Berenyi on her memoir.

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