Rubblebucket’s new album explores one particular year from the band’s past known as the Year Of The Banana. Frontwoman Kalmia Traver has a personal practice of naming each year since 2011, ie: Year of Brushstrokes (2014), Year Of The Mountain And The Steady Flame (2022), Year Of Stop Crying, Start Flying (2023), etc. However, in 2015 (Year Of The Banana) Kalmia’s romantic relationship with Rubblebucket co-founder Alex Toth fell apart, and that year was spent peeling off psychological layers in search of the sweetness that would allow the friendship, and the band, to continue. “People get obsessed with the albums that were never finished because the band couldn’t stay together,” Kalmia says. “But Year Of The Banana is the album that did get finished.” So Rubblebucket is celebrating 15 years as a band with a record about the year it almost ended.

Kalmia and co-bandleader Alex Toth had formed Rubblebucket four years into their romantic relationship and lasted another six as a couple within the band. In 2015, after ten years together, they were unraveling. “We tried couples therapy,” Kal says. “Even an open relationship.” Alex adds, “I proposed to Kal in the recording studio! She said yes and we broke up a few months later anyway.” The future of the band was uncertain; could Kal and Alex stay friends and continue to work together post-breakup? Kal says, “It just shows what’s possible if you try every wild therapy imaginable.”

The band brought in mediators, hypnotherapists, psycho-therapists, life coaches, business coaches, recovery groups, guided hallucinogens…Year Of The Banana was birthed from a cornucopia of self-help, spiritual practices, and drugs. In fact, while making the record, Alex and Kalmia kept a list of album ingredients (see list below).

Despite the difficulties these two long-time friends faced in working together, the energy from their fans and joyfully-excellent live touring ensemble inspired them to get back into the studio and writing room for perhaps their deepest and grooviest work yet.

Year Of The Banana opens with an immediate feeling of positivity in the face of melancholy. Kal sings, “When I see the way you’re leaning into living, it makes me want to lean towards living too.” And we’re already dancing. Rubblebucket is still a through-and-through art rock dance band, virtuosic experimental musicians with a pop sensibility along the lines of Talking Heads, Prince, or Kate Bush. But there’s nothing retro about Rubblebucket’s sound; they’re mixing electronics with real instruments, especially horn sections (Alex plays trumpet, Kalmia sax) and they feel at home in the same universe as Caroline Polachek, SZA, or Chappell Roan.

On “Moving Without Touching”, Kal sings high Brian Wilson-esque ooh-oohs while describing disconnection. “I just wanna love you how you want me to, so tell me how you like it…” The lyrics from the album are adapted from a collection of poems Kal wrote in 2015, setting these past feelings to looking-back emotions, sympathy for what their past selves went through, the uncertainty of that year, and gratitude to be able to look back at it safely from the other side.

“The Sorrow That Comes With Loving You” has hints of Motown songwriting but with a tighter more modern dance-beat. “Rattlesnake” is surely the funkiest cut on the record, though it opens with the neurotic “I don’t want to analyze you but…” And it unveils itself as one character pushing another to self-examine; for Rubblebucket, therapy takes the form of a dance party. “Go All The Way With Me” feels like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” through a Charli XCX filter while simultaneously being more fun than either of those things. “Swimming In The Light” is a late-album highlight, an extremely groovy list of fantasies that the narrator recognizes as fantasies. “We’re hanging upside down and you pass me a maraschino cherry with your mouth in my imagination… I’ve got your picture but I wanna get to know you for real.”

Listening to Year Of The Banana, it’s impossible to overlook how joyful it is, how full of hope. The album speaks to the power of transforming and adapting relationships in a time when the world needs it most. It speaks of yearning & striving for familiar intimacy that has been stripped away from much of our society by the extractive powers of capitalism. It speaks of creative ways of finding togetherness in a time when humans are the most divided from each other and from the myriad life forms of nature. The album has a transforming effect, inspiring us to face ourselves and radically keep loving each other, assuring us that the unpredictable process has potential to feel as free and sweet as peeling a banana on the dance floor.

Ingredient List

Alex’s Ingredients

3.5 grams of psilocybin
.5 grams mdma
hella tears
strong desire to have less desire
30-40 hours of paid mediation so that i could keep working with my best friend
birds
dirty green rooms
huge crowds
songs and voice memos
fear of death
fear of life
candles out the ass
melted wax everywhere and every which way
dysfunctional but pleasurable romances

Kal’s Ingredients

Garlic
Travel
Topography
Secret hiding spaces
Morning glories
Personal sacred geometry
rock
mountain
oak tree
Plant cuttings
Rollerblading
Cool wind at night
Seltzer
Camaraderie
Angelic oversight
Grounding
Polka dots