For a band that spent years drifting in the margins, Strange Fruit’s return doesn’t feel like a comeback. It feels like arrival.
The Jakarta outfit’s new Drips EP, released via Gentle Tuesday Recordings, captures a group that has quietly dismantled its past and rebuilt something more deliberate in its place. Where Strange Fruit once leaned into guitar-led shoegaze and slow-burning melancholy, Drips moves with the confidence of a band no longer searching for direction. The sound is electronic, metropolitan, and rhythm-forward — shaped by Acid House, kosmische repetition, ambient drift, and leftfield club culture — yet it never loses its emotional core.
That shift is most clearly felt on Iridescent, the EP’s defining moment. The track pulses with machine-driven energy but remains strangely light, almost translucent, as if floating just above the dancefloor. It’s music built on repetition and restraint rather than climax, letting mood and motion do the work. Vocalist Baldi Calvianca has described the song as spiritual and healing, and that sense comes through in the way the track unfolds — less performance, more release.
Across the EP’s four originals, Strange Fruit explore different angles of this new identity. Pouvoi Moteur locks into an acid-flecked Krautrock pulse that feels designed for late nights and low ceilings. Drips carries remnants of the band’s shoegaze past, but reframed through electronics rather than guitars. Monopolar leans into a steady, chugging groove that prioritises momentum over melody, while Iridescent glows with a quiet confidence that suggests the band has stopped trying to prove anything.
The remix contributors expand that world without overpowering it. Sean Johnston pushes the material deeper into club territory, Tom Furse adds tension and texture, and Jonathan Kusuma’s Hypnodubmix of Iridescent strips the track down to its essence. His version moves slowly and deliberately, driven by bass pressure and repetition, with Calvianca’s vocals reduced to distant echoes that feel more felt than heard.
What makes Drips EP compelling isn’t just its sound, but the context around it. Strange Fruit formed in 2012, released The Dolphin Leap in 2015, then disappeared from view for nearly a decade. That absence now feels essential. Rather than returning with a nostalgic rewrite of their early work, the band has re-emerged with something entirely different — music shaped by patience, curiosity, and time spent unlearning old habits.
The EP also signals a broader creative chapter, leading toward a new mini-album due in 2026. It aligns closely with the ethos of Gentle Tuesday Recordings, a Jakarta-based label born from a weekly gathering and built on experimentation rather than expectation.
Drips doesn’t announce itself loudly. It doesn’t chase trends or lean on history. Instead, it moves with quiet purpose, capturing a band finally comfortable inhabiting the space they’ve been circling for years. For Strange Fruit, this isn’t a rebirth wrapped in spectacle — it’s a recalibration, and it sounds exactly like the future they were meant to make.
