There is a particular kind of courage in starting over when the world has already written your ending. For Miki Berenyi, that ending arrived on 17 October 1996, when Lush drummer Chris Acland was found dead at his parents’ home in Burneside, Cumbria. He was thirty years old. The band – co-fronted by Berenyi and Emma Anderson, one of the defining acts of the shoegaze movement – did not officially announce their split until February 1998, but everyone present knew the truth. As Berenyi later wrote in her memoir, she did not even want the publicity of a breakup statement. “Isn’t it fucking obvious?” she told The Guardian in 2015. “We knew it was over. Fuck the rest of the world. I just retreated completely.”
Nearly three decades on, Berenyi has not merely re-emerged – she has engineered one of the most improbable second acts in British independent music. The Miki Berenyi Trio’s debut album, Tripla, released on 4 April 2025 via Bella Union, entered Metacritic’s ranking of the year’s best albums at number 47. Pitchfork, in a review by Sadie Sartini Garner, called it “bruised by the passage of time, even as it refuses to indulge in nostalgia.” That a record born from bookshop readings for a memoir could achieve such traction is a testament not only to Berenyi’s enduring craft but to the peculiar alchemy of her new collaboration.
From Fingers Crossed to First Notes
The genesis of MB3 – Miki Berenyi Trio – lies not in a rehearsal room or a record-label pitch but in the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. Having spent the pandemic months writing her memoir, Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success, published by Nine Eight Books in September 2022, Berenyi anticipated that book events would require musical accompaniment. The shimmering, effects-drenched sound of Lush would be impossible to replicate solo. She recruited bassist Oliver Cherer and guitarist Kevin “Moose” McKillop – both veterans of her previous band Piroshka – and they began performing at bookshops with a drum machine for rhythm.
“We formed to provide musical accompaniment for book events,” Berenyi told Qobuz. “But as the band gelled, and with offers of gigs throughout 2023, MB3 gathered momentum.” What began as a practical arrangement evolved into something more organic: a three-way songwriting partnership that produced nine tracks across forty minutes of dream pop, shoegaze, and electronica. The album’s title – Hungarian for “triple” – honours both the trio’s democratic structure and Berenyi’s father Ivan, a Hungarian exile whose chaotic parenting she documented with unflinching candour in her memoir.
Critics were quick to notice the distinction between MB3 and Piroshka, the four-piece that emerged briefly from Lush’s 2015–16 reunion. As Jason Ferguson wrote in his Qobuz review: “While Piroshka seemed intentionally designed to blur Berenyi’s role into that of an equal contributor to a four-piece rock band whose sound style was quite distinct from Lush’s poppy shoegaze, the MB3 both front-faces the singer/guitarist and explicitly calls back to the dreampop she made in the ’90s.”
The Politics of Ageing in Indie
What distinguishes Tripla from a mere nostalgia exercise is its topical hunger. The opening track and lead single, “8th Deadly Sin,” channels climate anxiety through a barrage of programmed synths and shoegaze guitars. “Plastic seas, plastic lives,” Berenyi sings, skewering what McKillop, in the Bella Union press notes, describes as “the absolute disrespect for Mother Earth.” The song’s relentless kick drum and swirling synths enact the very distraction the lyric laments – a structural device that Pitchfork identified as the album’s most sophisticated manoeuvre.
“Big I Am” takes aim at online misogyny and the toxic masculinity amplified by social media figures such as Andrew Tate. The track’s choppier rhythms and guitar crunch have been described as “dream pop by way of Two Tone” – a combination rarely attempted, let alone accomplished with such finesse. MusicOMH’s John Murphy praised the song for its capacity to address “the timely subject of online misogyny” while remaining “never a depressing or difficult listen.”
For Berenyi, now fifty-eight, the question of relevance is not abstract. “Ageing artists aren’t relics,” she asserted in the Creativity’s UK interview. “We’re navigating the same chaos – just with more baggage.” This assertion carries particular weight in an industry that has historically discarded women past their thirties. Tripla refuses that script entirely. “A Different Girl,” about the opportunities Berenyi hopes her daughter may have, is “optimistic and cheerful,” according to Murphy, while the six-minute “Manu” – anchored by a mighty dub-like bassline and featuring a trumpet-led jam – demonstrates an ambition that belies any assumptions about late-career diminishing returns.
Trauma, Testimony, and the Problem of the Memoir
Any serious discussion of Berenyi’s current work must reckon with the shadow cast by Fingers Crossed. The memoir documented childhood sexual abuse, dysfunctional parents – a Hungarian father who thought nothing of taking an eight-year-old to bars, and a Japanese mother, Yasuko Nagazumi, who had appeared in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice before becoming a photographer’s agent in Los Angeles – and the self-destructive coping mechanisms that followed. It was, as The Guardian‘s Kitty Empire wrote, “a nuanced, honest portrait of a troubled childhood – and a corrective to a much-mythologised era.”
The book’s reception was revelatory. Kirkus Reviews called it “often harrowing, often cautionary, and an altogether fine, self-aware study of a life in rock.” The Library Journal designated it “a must-read rock memoir in a genre where too few women’s voices are heard.” For Berenyi, the recognition was unexpected. “I thought no one cared about the singer from Lush,” she admitted in the Creativity’s UK piece.
Yet Tripla represents something more complex than a memoir’s aftermath. As Pitchfork’s Garner observed: “Like any good autobiography, it deals patiently with the past without trying to recreate it.” The album’s relationship to Lush’s catalogue is one of respectful distance rather than mimicry. Berenyi’s soprano – described by Qobuz as a “wafer-thin reed” that “has hardly dulled with time” – serves as the connective tissue, but the sonic palette has expanded considerably. The dubby, synth-driven “Gango” and the “exotica-stained” marimba textures of “Ubique” suggest an artist more interested in exploration than replication.
Shoegaze’s Second Wave and MB3’s Place Within It
The timing of Tripla is no accident. Shoegaze has undergone a significant critical and commercial reappraisal in the 2020s, driven in part by Gen Z’s embrace of dream pop aesthetics on streaming platforms. As The Arts Desk‘s Tim Cumming noted, “shoegaze is big in introspective Gen Zed circles,” and MB3’s Lexington gig in autumn 2024 drew “more from original 1990s gig-goers,” suggesting the audience remains generational even as the genre’s influence broadens.
The term itself, coined by the British music press as a pejorative – reportedly inspired by the image of a young William Burroughs “zonked out on Eukodol” staring at the floor – has been thoroughly reclaimed. As Berenyi told the original Creativity’s UK piece: “We never gazed at our shoes. Maybe our effects boards.” The joke masks a real grievance: Lush were consistently undervalued relative to their male shoegaze contemporaries, My Bloody Valentine and Ride, despite producing what The Guardian described as “gauzy music [that] felt like being cocooned in bejewelled spiderwebs.”
MB3’s existence on Bella Union – the label co-founded by Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins, who produced Lush’s debut EP Mad Love in 1990 – creates a neat historical circuit. The label’s roster, which includes Fleet Foxes, Beach House, and Father John Misty, positions Berenyi’s new work within a lineage of atmospheric, emotionally literate guitar music rather than confining it to a decade-specific niche.
The Tour and the Unfinished Business of Live Performance
The Tripla album launch at Rough Trade East on 4 April 2025 – followed by dates at Rough Trade Liverpool and Bristol – kicked off an extensive UK and European tour that has extended well into the autumn and winter months, with a rescheduled Leeds date at the Lending Room on 7 December 2025 and a show at Exeter’s Cavern. The band toured with Lol Tolhurst of The Cure on the European leg, and a collaborative track, “Stranger,” was released via Bella Union – a connection that underscores MB3’s credibility within the broader post-punk and dream-pop ecosystem.
Oliver Cherer’s health complications forced the postponement of the Edinburgh and Newcastle dates in late 2025, a reminder of the fragility that accompanies any musical project involving human bodies and finite energy. “We were hoping for Ollie to make a full recovery from surgery,” Berenyi wrote on social media, “but he is back in hospital with complications.” The candour is characteristic: Berenyi has built her post-Lush career on the principle that honesty, however uncomfortable, is the only viable creative currency.
Staying True to the Voice
There is a moment in Tripla‘s closer, “Ubique,” where unexpected marimba and strings surface beneath the familiar shoegaze guitar wash – a detail that Qobuz‘s Ferguson identified as evidence that “even then, there are touches that add depth and complexity to that now well-trodden sound.” It is a small detail, but it speaks to something larger about Berenyi’s project: the refusal to be defined by any single era, genre, or trauma.
“Relevance isn’t about trends,” she told Creativity’s UK. “It’s about staying true to your voice, even when the world moves on.” For an artist whose first chapter ended in grief and whose second began in a bookshop with a drum machine, that insistence on vocal continuity – across loss, reinvention, and the slow accumulation of hard-won wisdom – is perhaps the most radical statement of all. Tripla does not ask permission to exist. It simply does, with the quiet authority of someone who has survived everything the music industry, and life, could throw at her.
Tripla is out now on Bella Union. The Miki Berenyi Trio continues touring the UK through December 2025.
