Album release show at Unruly Collective in Brooklyn This Friday 12/8: tickets here!
Words by Willa Rudolph
Photo by T Goodwin, Styled by Syd Henry, MUA by Alyssa Vitalino / Drawings by Lola Lancón
New York based euro-punk-rock trio Le Bang is releasing a new single and music video to precede their upcoming debut album Robot Island (presave here!) out this Friday on December 8th. This new video, released today, is for a song entitled “BANG ANTHEM,” serving an introduction to the distinct world Paris-born-and-bred lead singer Lola Lancón has created for herself and her two friends, Le Bang drummer Stavros Lari and bassist Billy Hay.
The music video is stripped-down and graphic in its visual style, showing the members of Le Bang dancing and playing cardboard cut-out versions of their instruments in front of a wall tagged with the word “Astoria”. The musicians are visited by characters such as Godzilla, Lisa Simpson, and Goku from Dragon Ball Z, as cartoon explosions go off behind them and comic book onomatopoeia words like “BANG!” and “POW!” pop out from the colorful background. “BANG ANTHEM” is a lo-fi pop-y punk track, with euro/french influences and sprinkles of mid-2000’s indie: think The Ting Tings, Black Kids, and CSS.
“BANG ANTHEM” is about “nothing in particular,” Lola tells the Deli. “It’s all about having fun while singing a bunch of comic book onomatopoeias in a catchy way, with some threshold bass in the back. It’s inspired by Brigitte Bardot’s lines in the song “Comic Strip” by Serge Gainsbourg.”
Lola has invented an immersive universe for her band and the upcoming album which will cross over into our world in two days. The tone of Le Bang’s comic book creation is playful, mischievous, and punk rock. Robot Island consists of “pop-y punk songs that will be stuck in your head for weeks,” Lancón explains. “Some songs reference real life scenarios (good or bad) in surrealist comedic lights. The whole point of this album is to make angry littles punks shake their butt and to introduce everyone to our comic book world. Robot Island, the name of the album, will also be the name of our ongoing comic series that dives deeper into each band member’s antihero persona. Some cool shit overall.”
As a little kid, Lola was torn between two potential lines of work–Superhero or Rockstar. “I think that childhood dream just stuck with me through the years. I have this very vivid memory of me dressing up as Spiderman and singing along to Blur songs on my speaker,” Lancón recalls.
“When I got older, I got really into Gorillaz, and it was the first band I saw that had created an entire cast of fictional characters and a world around their music. People were soooo into those characters–these fake people have a fan base! That’s like crazy,” the multitalented artist gushes. “When I slowly got into music like three years ago, and I started to emerge in the scene in NY, I really felt like I could do something bigger than me. And after my first two bands with friends didn’t work out, I decided to start from scratch with these two guys that I didn’t really know at first. I wanted to merge all the things that I loved since I was a kid. I was born a geek and still am one, and that’s alright.”
Lola is a true artist–she thinks of every last aspect and detail to pore over, and each piece of her project is thought through and has purpose and intention behind it. Watch out for Robot Island (presave here!) coming this Friday with an album release show in Brooklyn, NY the day of the release (tickets here!) where you may even meet this writeup’s author…
