Banquet Darling turns the present into theatre on new album 'NOW'

Banquet Darling has never sounded especially interested in staying inside one genre, and 'NOW' embraces that instinct with real confidence. Todd Kilby’s second album under the moniker moves between pop, indie-rock, punk and psychedelia with an almost theatrical restlessness, but there's still enough melodic discipline underneath the chaos to keep the record from flying apart.

Right from the start, 'NOW' is preoccupied with the way memory, anxiety, hope and anticipation can all exist at once. But instead of treating the present as something calm or centred, the artist presents it as crowded, contradictory and constantly shifting.

Musically, the record reflects that perfectly as grooves arrive unexpectedly, guitars sharpen and soften from one passage to the next, and moments of pop brightness can suddenly give way to something more unruly or psychedelic. The result feels deliberately unpredictable, but never random.

Kilby’s background in circus performance also seems to inform the album’s sense of scale and presentation. There's an instinct for drama here, in the way each song seems designed to occupy its own little stage. And that theatricality gives 'NOW' much of its personality.

Compared with 2021’s 'Dreamlove Obscura', the new record feels broader in both sound and subject. The eccentricity remains, but the writing is more directly connected with acceptance, love, confusion and the difficulty of making sense of a mind that refuses to stay still.

Colourful, inventive and knowingly excessive, 'NOW' finds Banquet Darling treating the present moment as a strange, noisy, ever-changing place worth exploring.