Strangest Feeling’ is a collection of songs written amongst the limbo of the lockdowns and the transition back to life.
A flavour of autumn runs through the album, intwined with themes of spells, the ocean and Halloween.
The punky riffs and driving drums of new single Olive Oil and the album’s second single Bittersweet are reminders of fun and joy, with Bittersweet offering a slice of unadulterated punky grunge in the playful ode to finding fun in chaos, inspired by Bonnie’s stay in New Zealand during the pandemic.
Once described by Fink, who championed Bonniesongs heavily on his KCRW radio show and toured Australia with her, as having “a deceptively hard edged soft-core.” The album’s ‘love songs’ come in the form of art-rock pop ballad and album opener, ‘Dragon’, the grungy psych-folk of ‘Whipping Bird’ and the dreamy indie-rock of title track, ‘Strangest Feeling’ (a semi-finalist within two categories in the International Songwriting Competition), collectively exploring relationships with others and oneself.
The haunting layers of vocals, whistles and strings of ‘Take Off’ offer the album’s most emotive song however, with Bonniesongs taking the listener on an emotional journey exploring connection to place and home, capturing the unrest of missing home when you move country.
As with a few tracks on the album, the unsettling times of the pandemic lace the songs with the strange otherworldliness of that time.
On ‘Strangest Feeling”, Bonniesongs tackles the most visceral of life experiences, with all their sharp edges, then wraps them in a sensory, expansive cloud of dream-like glaze.
