For nearly 40 years now, Jennifer Herrema has tuned her inner antennae to the sound of the radio—or at least, the experience of listening to it. Navigating her vast discography—with Royal Trux, then RTX, and now Black Bananas—feels a lot like randomly sliding back and forth on an FM dial, where you might bounce between classic-rock fist-pumpers, retro roller-rink jams, crackly country golden oldies, and whatever weird shit the overnight DJ at your local campus station can get away with playing at 3 a.m.

The first Black Bananas album in 12 years exists in that space beyond the city limits where the signal starts to fade, faint transmissions of bygone pop hits dissolve into static, and rock gods become ghosts. Though it was long delayed by a combination of factors (including Royal Trux’s ill-fated late-2010s reunion and the pandemic), Bad Bunch feels like the logical next step for the project—which is to say it continues to push the group toward the illogical.

On 2012’s Rad Times Xpress IV and 2014’s Electric Brick Wall, Herrema and bandmates Brian McKinley and Kurt Midness triggered an increasingly chaotic soundclash between two oft-segregated ’80s aesthetics: hotwired-Camaro hair metal and block-party electro. But where Black Bananas retained the ripped-denim facade of a rock group even in their most techno-curious moments, Bad Bunch dives deep into a B-boy bouillabaisse of hip-hop, R&B, dub, and pawn-shop electronics, blurring the line between experimental band and production team.

This is a strange group that only gets stranger the closer it veers to pop music. In the hands of a typical band, the opening “Nutrageous & Jam” might come off as a candlelit R&B boudoir ballad primed for Lite FM rotation. Black Bananas make it feel like you’re walking through a dream where the surroundings feel familiar, but the faces are blurred and you can’t understand what anyone’s saying. Herrema stumbles and mumbles her way into the track as if she’s just been roused from a years-long nap—perhaps fittingly, given that her band has been out of commission for over a decade—but instead of shaking off the grogginess, she lingers in that half-awake state, her vocals smeared into a brassy blare that fills the space where the soft-rock sax solo would go. And while it wouldn’t be a true Black Bananas song without some degree of shredding, the guitar solo is less a focal point than just another subliminal frequency to upset the equilibrium.

As “Nutrageous & Jam” makes clear from the jump, the one characteristic that’s always connected Herrema’s crazy-quilt canon—her distinctive, dirty ashtray of a voice—is fair game for pitch-shifting pulverization. Even at their most accessible, Black Bananas remain gratifyingly inscrutable: The stuttering trap claps, digitized vocal squeals, and vaporwave veneer of “Outta My Head” actually sound more like 2012 than anything Black Bananas were actually making in 2012, while the hypnagogic groover “Turkey Burgers” is a readymade zone-out soundtrack for health-conscious stoners seeking less fatty forms of protein to curb their late-night munchies. And where they once tricked out skeeze-metal riffs with rap-schooled beat science, Herrema and co. are now crafting the sorts of squelching synth-funk bops (like “All the Way”) that you could easily imagine getting sandwiched between Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” and George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” in a club mix circa 1982—though in Black Bananas’ case, it sounds like the 7" got cooked in a microwave for 30 seconds before landing on the turntable.

Now more than ever, Herrema’s music has become a reflection of her inimitable fashion sense—even at her most casual, she looks like she’s wearing the entire contents of a thrift store all at once, finding the common threads between seemingly incompatible eras and aesthetics. So while many veteran artists tend to mark the passage of time in their work through personal reflection, Herrema’s evolution is best understood as a process of accumulation. She’s continually layering her myriad ideas, influences, and experiences into ever-expanding and mutating masses like “Dust of Ages,” seven minutes of squirming dub sludge that seems like it could swallow up a city until a battalion of machine-gunned synths stops it dead in its tracks.

And then there’s the gloriously cacophonous clusterfuck that is “Cold Bussin,” whose deceptively chill shuffle beat lures you into a 360-degree storm of mercurial melodies, chopped vocal samples, ear-piercing electro bleeps, and nuclear-grade guitar carnage that adds up to the most dense and discombobulating music Herrema has produced since Royal Trux’s infamous Twin Infinitives. Listening to it feels a lot like peering into someone’s junk drawer, where old sets of keys enmesh with rubber bands and paperclips and expired coupons and outmoded iPhone charging cables—you can put your mind at ease by zeroing in on the individual elements, because the totality is almost too much to fathom. As much as Bad Bunch tries to obfuscate and obliterate Herrema’s voice, her vision still cuts through loud and clear.