Melt Banana’s 3+5 is one of the extreme albums of the year. It’s also completely off its baps

With a vast landscape of space-age noise rock taken to its most illogical, avant-garde, experimental apex, Melt-Banana have been defying and redefining the boundaries of organised sound since 1992. 

Yasuko ‘Yako’ Onuki (vocals) and Ichiro Agata (everything else, but mostly through the medium of guitar) have been the band’s core since the start, but since 2012 the Tokyo duo have relied on a wall of amps, a phalanx of pedals and outboard effects, and advances in technology in their sui generis forward-thrust through the world of ineffable rock and/or roll. 

3+5 is the band’s ninth full-length album – because, of course, in Melt-Banana’s unique universe, 3+5=9 – and exists as a synthesised mutation of the vast variety of elements that have comprised the band’s sound since the start, sculpted into fully-formed finery. Yako’s laughing gas-fuelled chipmunk parries are the seemingly innocent foil to the multiplicity of tiers Agata invokes in the creation of the grandiose gossamer glitching in Seeds and Whisperer. 

Case D summons images of mach-whatever fighter-jet guitars soaring across pastel-coloured skies, while Scar is the foreground soundtrack to a blithe and breezy gathering of gamers and prog metal nerds bawling in en masse bliss. On the grittier side of the glitter is Puzzle, which underlies tendonitis-inducing guitar and trapped-insect flight pattern riffing with inhuman blast beats the way only a non-human can do ’em, and Stopgap’s transposition of 80s hardcore through the neon-coloured grid of their hometown’s vividly chaotic downtown. 

The portal to Melt-Banana’s singular world lies at the confluence of basement show hardcore, Japanimation, the opportunities provided by the shine of new technology, and a dig through the dustiest of disorganised record stores. And 3+5 is another addition to what are simultaneously the happiest, harshest and most heterogeneous sonic morsels offered by the entirety of extreme music.

3+5 is out now via A-Zap. Melt-Banana tour the UK from August 29 and headline Supersonic Festival in Birmingham on August 30. For the full list of dates, visit their official website.