Year Of The Banana is the stalwart indie band Rubblebucket's 7th full-length recording. Frontperson Kalmia Traver says “People get obsessed with the albums that were never finished because the band couldn’t stay together. But Year Of The Banana is the album that did get finished" –– evidently against all odds and only with the support of "mediators, hypnotherapists, psycho-therapists, life coaches, business coaches, recovery groups, guided hallucinogens."
Rubblebucket’s seeds were sown when Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth, the group’s front persons, co-writers and co-producers, first began a friendship as jazz students at the University of Vermont. Soon after, they formed Rubblebucket, using the project to delve into pop, funk, dance and psychedelia; performances have spanned Bonnaroo to Glastonbury to their self-curated Dream Picnic Festival, and they’ve collaborated with kindred genre-blenders including Arcade Fire and Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. Their latest full-length LP ‘Year of the Banana’ is perhaps their deepest and grooviest work yet. It speaks to the power of transforming and adapting relationships in a time when the world needs it most.
After many years of recording and touring with Underground System and the FELA! band, Lollise now shares her own bold Afro-futurist pop sound, rich with layers of kinetic, danceable percussion and gentle waves of ambient noise. Lollise is a multi-disciplinary artist from Francistown, Botswana, based in NYC. Using sound, color and movement, Lollise tells stories in real and imagined worlds that are multidimensional and nuanced, historical and futuristic. She performs with a potent energy and commitment to the music, in body and in spirit.
Lollise emigrated to the US to study chemistry; after college she worked in a spinal cord injury lab in Philadelphia, left science to become a handbag designer in New York, and then joined a band. While refining her craft on tour with other projects in Europe, Nigeria and the US, she began writing her own music, developing her vision and voice.
She released her debut singles with captivating DIY music videos during the lockdown of 2020, then released two EPs – Looking At You (2020) and Unborn (2022) – before completing her debut full-length I hit the water, released September 2024 with Switch Hit Records. She also co-wrote and featured on the Delasi song “Learn from Adversity” (Brownswood Recordings, 2024).
Lollise creates hybrid songs for this moment, taking influence from the music she grew up with – Setswana and Kalanga folk songs, '80s and '90s South African electronic bubblegum and kwaito, Congolese soukous and Zimbabwean sungura – and the music she has been exposed to in New York, including Afrobeat, new wave, and art-pop.
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