Blonde Redhead

Since 1993 · United States

Blonde Redhead formed in New York in 1993, taking their name directly from a DNA song as a nod to the no wave scene that had shaped the city's underground a decade earlier. Their story

See them on the map

Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons (2000)

Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons finds Blonde Redhead pulling their earlier noise-rock instincts toward something more melodic and atmospheric without smoothing them away entirely. "In Particular" pairs Kazu Makino's breathy, slightly off-center vocal with warm string arrangements and guitar textures that drift rather than announce themselves. The record's prettier surfaces still carry an undertow of the band's more dissonant earlier records underneath. It marked the turn toward the more widely heard, dream-pop-adjacent sound the band would keep refining for the rest of their career.

Sleeve notes

Blonde Redhead

Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons · 2000

Blonde Redhead formed in New York in 1993, taking their name directly from a DNA song as a nod to the no wave scene that had shaped the city's underground a decade earlier. The band's early sound combined angular, dissonant guitar interplay with vocalist Kazu Makino and guitarist Amedeo Pace trading lead vocals, building a version of noise rock informed as much by the city's earlier no wave lineage as by contemporaries like Sonic Youth.

Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons (2000) marked a turn toward more melodic, atmospheric songwriting without abandoning the band's noisier instincts entirely, incorporating string arrangements and a warmer, more dream-pop-adjacent sound that widened the band's audience considerably. Blonde Redhead continued evolving in this more melodic direction across the records that followed, carrying the confrontational lineage of their band name into music that had grown considerably more accessible without losing its underlying strangeness.