Flower City Sonic Files: Bananach

Bandung’s underground scene is loud, crowded, and allergic to staying in one lane — which is exactly why **Bananach **feels like such a relief. They’re not chasing a sound everyone else is already playing. They’re a fuzzed-out, post-punk noise rock band that treats chaos less like a side effect and more like the whole point.

The lineup: Karina Sokowati on vocals, Mojan Larasati on guitar, Fay Murray on drums, Java Anggara on bass. Four people, one very loud agreement that distortion solves most problems. Watch them live and you’ll understand fast — this isn’t a band built for polite head-nodding. It’s a band built for losing your footing in a crowd.

They’ve been at it publicly since 2017, but the real story starts earlier, in 2013, when the band was less a band and more a rotating cast of people figuring out if this was even going to work. Lineups shifted. Things were shaky. Then in 2014, Fay Murray sat down behind the kit and stayed there — and that’s when Bananach actually became Bananach.

For years after that, they were a live band first and a recorded band almost never. Stages, DIY gigs, word of mouth — that’s where they built their name. The tape evidence was thin: just two rough tracks on a 2019 release called Wasted Demo. Everything else, you had to be there for.

Then the pandemic hit, and “being there” stopped being an option.

Instead of waiting it out, Bananach went inward. No shows, no stages — so they funneled all of it into finishing their debut EP, Panoptic Litter. Five songs, sixteen minutes, and somehow that’s enough time to drag you through everything isolation does to a person’s head. It’s compact in the way a punch is compact.

Fuzz guitar runs the whole show here — dirty, relentless, the kind of noise that makes space for lyrics that are personal one second and furious at the world the next. This isn’t an EP about feelings in the abstract. It’s about being young, broke, online, and exhausted by people in charge who’ve clearly never doubted themselves once.

It opens with Lethal Messy, a slow-burn track that doesn’t ease you in so much as plant a flag. It’s aimed at power, at people who mistake authority for correctness, at the comfortable status quo that depends on everyone else staying quiet. From there the EP doesn’t really pause — Bigot Dance hits harder, Doubt pulls back into something more uncertain and exposed, and Virgin Fuckboy closes things out by refusing to wrap anything up neatly.

What holds the five tracks together isn’t a hook or a sound — it’s honesty, the unglamorous kind. Karina, who writes the lyrics, built this EP around a simple idea: you don’t owe anyone proof that your life is impressive. Mediocrity is allowed. Confusion is allowed. That’s basically the whole thesis, and it’s a relief to hear a band say it instead of perform certainty they don’t have.

And the EP didn’t just live in Indonesia. Once touring became possible again, Bananach flew to Germany for their first international run since lockdown — eleven days, seven cities, kicked off in Berlin at Decolonoize Fest on May 28. They shared stages with The Muslims, Shoreline, and a string of BIPOC- and queer-fronted acts, turning a tour built out of pandemic restlessness into something that felt genuinely international.

Bananach took a period defined by isolation and distance and somehow turned it into the opposite — noise, proximity, a room full of strangers losing it together. That’s the trick. That’s the whole band, really.

Listen to Bananach: https://bananachtunes.bandcamp.com/music

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