There are artists who return to the scene like visiting dignitaries, carrying old songs in velvet cases, polished and protected from the fingerprints of now. Miki Berenyi does not do that. She comes back with the dust still on the boots, the wiring exposed, the old ghosts told to stand in the corner and behave themselves.
Miki Berenyi Trio is not Lush reheated. It is not Piroshka narrowed down. It is not one more shoegaze heritage act floating mistily across the festival lawn while everyone gently remembers their fringe. It is something sharper, stranger and more alive than that: a late-career band that understands the past without kneeling before it.
The trio is Berenyi with KJ “Moose” McKillop and Oliver Cherer, three musicians with enough history behind them to know that reverence can become a trap. Their debut album Tripla carries the residue of dream pop, post-punk, electronic pulse and guitar shimmer, but it never settles into museum air. It feels less like a comeback than a system reboot: familiar voice, new circuitry, old damage running through fresh copper.
That voice still matters. Berenyi’s singing has always had an odd double quality: bright enough to cut through weather, bruised enough to suggest the weather got in first. In Lush, it floated over guitars that could sound narcotic, pearlescent, dangerous or sugar-rushed depending on the decade and the damage. In Miki Berenyi Trio, the voice is less a dream-pop ornament than a narrator with the house lights up. The haze is still there, but now you can see the screws in the floorboards.
Tripla is a telling title. It sounds like a secret code, a foreign instruction, a three-part spell stamped onto the side of a machine. It also points to the real engine of the group: this is not Miki plus backing. It is a triangle. Berenyi, Moose and Cherer bring different histories into the room, and the album works because it lets those histories bump, spark and misbehave.
Where a lesser project might have tried to reproduce the grand blur of the early ’90s, Miki Berenyi Trio are more interested in what happens after the blur clears. What remains after the myth, the magazine covers, the loaded questions, the bad men, the scenes that were named by people standing outside them? What can a guitar band say once the old heroic nonsense has been stripped for parts?
The answer, on Tripla, is plenty.
Big I Am: Ego As Target Practice
“Big I Am” arrives with a bounce in its boots and a sneer behind the curtain. It is one of the album’s most immediately physical tracks: choppier, funkier, less interested in floating than in shoulder-checking its way through the room. There is dream pop in the DNA, but the rhythm has a clipped, street-corner insistence. The guitars crunch. The groove grins. The song moves like it has spotted a fraud at the bar and is slowly crossing the room.
The target is masculine inflation, especially the online species: loud, hollow, convinced that volume equals power. “Big I Am” is not a lecture. It is better than that. It is a takedown dressed as a dance track, a song that understands ridicule can puncture the balloon faster than outrage. Berenyi has spent too long inside the machinery of rock mythology to be impressed by swagger. She knows the costume. She knows the smell of the changing room.
That is why the song fits so cleanly into Yeah Bagel’s Open Format Transmission 2026.03. In that context, “Big I Am” does not sit politely as a heritage-indie selection. It acts like a signal flare. It connects older alternative histories to the present mess: post-shoegaze, post-Britpop, post-industry innocence, post-believing that the loudest man in the feed is anything other than an empty tin kicked down a tiled corridor.
On a transmission built around collision and current, “Big I Am” becomes more than a single track. It becomes a pressure valve. It carries the glamorous shadow of Berenyi’s past, then refuses to be trapped there. It says: yes, we remember the old rooms. No, we are not staying in them.
The Anti-Comeback Comeback
One of the great failures of music nostalgia is that it flattens artists into weather reports from their own youth. Once a band is filed under a scene, every later movement gets judged as either a return to form or a betrayal of it. Miki Berenyi Trio sidesteps that grubby little binary.
There are echoes, naturally. Berenyi’s voice cannot help but drag a comet tail of Lush behind it. Moose brings his own history from Moose and Piroshka. Cherer brings an ear for texture, electronics and off-centre song architecture. But Tripla never feels like a nostalgia exercise. It has too much present-tense friction. Its songs seem interested in ageing, ecology, memory, digital idiocy, grief, endurance and the absurd theatre of being a person who has survived the version of yourself that other people keep trying to sell back to you.
That last part matters. For artists who came through the ’90s British music press, survival was not simply artistic. It was social, emotional, anatomical. The era was often romanticised as a great carnival of guitar music, but it also came with a meat-market gaze, lad-mag cruelty, industry exhaustion and the constant demand that women be iconic, available, funny, photogenic, damaged, grateful and quiet in exactly the right proportions.
Berenyi was never especially built for quiet.
Her best writing, whether in songs or prose, has a plainspoken blade to it. She can be funny without softening the blow. She can be wounded without arranging the wound into a decorative centrepiece. That quality gives Miki Berenyi Trio its charge. The songs are melodic, often gorgeous, sometimes dreamy, but they are not vague. They do not dissolve into aesthetic vapour. They have opinions. They have scar tissue. They have receipts folded in the back pocket.
Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success
Berenyi’s autobiography, Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success, is essential context for Miki Berenyi Trio because it helps explain the emotional architecture underneath the music. The title alone does a lot of heavy lifting. It flips the usual rock memoir promise inside out. Music did not save her by delivering triumph. It saved her from the machinery that calls triumph a happy ending.
The book is not merely a Lush memoir, though Lush fans will find plenty of the band’s story in it: the formation, the tours, the press, the thrill, the grind, the collapse. It is also a memoir about childhood, class, gender, survival, friendship, grief and the strange bargain of public visibility. Berenyi writes with the voice of someone who has no interest in making the past more flattering than it was. There is no incense burned at the altar of the scene. There is love, fury, wit, pain and a refusal to let myth do the talking.
That refusal is what links the book to Tripla. The memoir clears the ground. It names the weather systems. It steps back through the wreckage and the bright rooms, not to wallow, but to understand how the map was drawn. The trio then feels like the music that can happen after that act of telling. Once the old story has been dragged into daylight, the songs do not need to pretend innocence. They can be adult in the best sense: not dull, not respectable, not beige-cardigan adult, but alert, funny, wounded, unsentimental and still looking for voltage.
In that way, Fingers Crossed is not just backstory. It is part of the instrument rack. It hums behind the new songs. You can hear it in the refusal of easy nostalgia, in the contempt for false power, in the way Tripla treats memory as material rather than shrine.
Not Saved By Success
The great joke of the title How Music Saved Me from Success is that success, in rock mythology, is supposed to be the rescue boat. You suffer, you form the band, you get discovered, you tour America, you climb the bill, you enter the golden machinery. Cue applause. Cue documentary montage. Cue tasteful archive footage.
Berenyi’s story knows better. Success can be a room with no windows. It can turn private pain into public product. It can reward the wrong people for the wrong things. It can demand that a young woman be simultaneously muse, mouthpiece, pin-up, punching bag and brand asset. It can turn bands into pressure cookers and scenes into costume departments.
Music, though, is different. Music can be contaminated by the business around it, but it is not the same thing as the business. Music can save you not by making you famous, but by giving you a language when ordinary speech has collapsed. It can save you by providing accomplices. By creating escape routes. By letting anger become rhythm, grief become harmony, memory become structure.
Miki Berenyi Trio sounds like music made by people who understand that difference. It does not confuse survival with victory. It does not confuse age with retreat. It does not confuse beauty with softness.
The Signal Continues
“Big I Am” on Yeah Bagel’s Open Format Transmission 2026.03 is a tidy little act of programming mischief from the universe: a song about inflated ego placed inside a mix that thrives on strange alliances, sideways histories and anti-boring intent. It reminds us that alternative music’s past is not a sealed archive. It is a crate of unstable materials. Touch the right wire and the present still lights up.
Miki Berenyi Trio are not asking to be remembered correctly. They are doing something more useful: they are making the memory move. They take the old shimmer and rough it up. They take the autobiography and refuse to leave it on the book table. They take the supposed afterlife of a career and turn it into a working band with a pulse.
There is no soft-focus fade here. No victory lap. No museum label reading “shoegaze icon, handle with care.”
Just three musicians, a drum machine heartbeat, some beautiful abrasion, and a voice that still knows exactly where to place the knife.
Fingers crossed, then.
Not for success.
For escape.
Yeah Bagel 