Ribbon Stage (from left): Jolie M-A, David Sweetie, and Anni Hilator.
Virginia ZwangzerIf you’re looking for indie-pop thrills this quarantined fall, you won’t find many better than the ones on My Favorite Shrine, the debut EP from New York City trio Ribbon Stage. Jamming five songs into eight minutes — the longest, “Personal Hell,” maxes out at a lean 2:21 — the EP is all sugar-buzz hooks and aching guitars, approaching the platonic ideal of what a DIY band can do with the right mix of amateur enthusiasm and accidental pop songcraft. When it ends, you’ll want to listen again; you’ll probably listen to it a few more times after that, too, unless you have somewhere better to be right now than the blissed-out basement show in your head.
Ribbon Stage is a very new band, formed last year by three friends in New York using the punk-rock pen names of Anni Hilator (bass and lead vocals), Jolie M-A (guitar), and David Sweetie (drums). The songs on My Favorite Shrine were initially intended as a demo tape before making their way to the venerable Pacific Northwest indie label K Records, which released it as a vinyl seven-inch in its International Pop Underground series this summer. They haven’t played a single show yet, but they’ve tapped into something great.
David, 35, is the most experienced musician of the three, having spent a decade on the road as the howling frontman for some of Monterrey, Mexico’s finest punk and hardcore bands. He won fans in local scenes across the Americas with Ratas Del Vaticano and Tercer Mundo, but those bands’ heavy sounds were only part of his listening diet. “I’ve always loved indie-pop since I was a teenager,” he says. “But in my mid-twenties, I was very angry, and I couldn’t have that. I didn’t want to be cute.”
By around 2015, when he moved to New York, he’d begun to feel differently: “I didn’t want to play guitar in another band. I wanted to do something new.”
He first crossed paths with Jolie at the late, lamented Brooklyn venue Silent Barn, where she was performing with a noise band for an audience that she recalls as being “99 percent friends.” David was impressed by her stage presence all the same: “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I need to make a band with Jolie.’”
Jolie, 28, who grew up in Miami listening to her family’s Simon and Garfunkel records (“hippie-adjacent parent music”) before moving on to Green Day, Nirvana, and Pavement, was looking for a change herself, especially after the band David saw her in at Silent Barn imploded not long afterward. “I tried to be in a pop band with punks a few times, and it didn’t quite catch,” she says. “I was pretty disheartened. I had visions of songs and melodies, but no way to articulate them.”
She and David began exchanging YouTube playlists full of indie-pop bands from the Seventies and Eighties like Dolly Mixture and the Shop Assistants. Soon they were writing songs together with David on drums and Jolie on guitar.
The final piece of the puzzle came together after Jolie got to know Anni through their work as counselors at the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, where they helped children aged five to seven start their first bands. “It was just a bunch of little kids banging on the guitar strings, and it was really fun,” Jolie says. “We were like, ‘We should do this’ — even though, from a technical perspective, our skills are maybe more close to what the seven-year-olds were doing than, say, any of our friends’ bands.”
An early attempt at starting a doom-rock duo fell by the wayside after Anni heard the songs that Jolie had begun writing with David. “I was playing them for her, and I think she liked them a lot better than the music I was coming up with between the two of us,” Jolie says. “So we all hung out, got some burritos, and merged bands.”
Anni, a 24-year-old Bay Area native with a background in furniture design, had never been in a real band before Ribbon Stage, but she quickly took to the lead-singer role in the new trio, writing most of the lyrics on the EP with a natural heartbreak-queen flair. “There was a lot of teen-diary inspiration, for sure,” she says. “We just riffed together so well.”
They recorded My Favorite Shrine last December on a 4-track tape deck in what Jolie recalls as “a windowless room in Bushwick.” Right away, it was clear that something magical was happening. “David has a really deep foundation of musical knowledge, and then there’s me, someone who’s obsessed with music but has literally no idea how to play, and Anni, who has a beautiful voice,” Jolie says. “You put that all together, and it’s scrappy without being bad.”
Jolie found Ribbon Stage’s name while googling cooking terms (“I didn’t like it, but they outvoted me,” she says). Anni used her visual-art training to design the EP’s pink-and-black cover, hand-drawing the lettering and the twee-horror images of flowers, ballet shoes, candles, and spiders. “We spent a long time making sure that it wasn’t too cute or too gnarly,” Jolie says. “It’s not just music, it’s accessories for your teenage bedroom.”
Since releasing My Favorite Shrine as a limited self-pressed cassette and a more widely distributed seven-inch through K, the band has been pleased to find that other people enjoy their music as much as they do. “I never share anything I do with my family members, but I felt like maybe this was universally likable enough to not totally humiliate myself,” Jolie says. “They were like, ‘Wow!’ They couldn’t believe it was so good. I was like, ‘Yeah, why would I make something bad?’”
The three musicians have been stranded separately by the pandemic — when we spoke over Zoom, Jolie was laying low in Olympia, Washington, while David and Anni were in Brooklyn and Queens — but they hope to gather and record Ribbon Stage’s first LP soon. “I have about seven songs written so far,” Jolie says. “I’ve been practicing the whole quarantine, and I feel really ready. … I’m playing the same seven songs on my little guitar, using the same five chords that I use, and I can’t wait to get Anni and David on them and make them into something completely different.”
Based in London, vocalist and DJ iKeda already appears to be following the path of a major pop act, although she is hesitant to accept that description. “These days, it’s just too easy to call someone a pop star,” she tells NME during a conversation in the sunshine at a Hackney pub garden. With her newest EP ‘Bangs N Braces’ almost here, she insists that such recognition should be deserved. “You really need to earn your stripes to have that label. Someone like PinkPantheress or Addison Rae, they’re building a whole image and world – those are true pop stars.”
Although she has yet to reach the same heights as those artists, her career is clearly gaining momentum. Since 2024, she has released songs combining the irresistible energy of UK funky, electroclash and dancehall, while becoming a familiar face across the London underground electropop scene. One of her biggest opportunities arrived earlier this year when she was invited to open for PinkPantheress during the celebrated ‘Fancy That’ tour, an experience she describes as “almost like a dream”.
“I just couldn’t believe I was playing venues that size at this point in my career,” she recalls. Instead of allowing those initial worries to overwhelm her, she transformed them into “super healing positive energy” and committed herself to delivering the strongest performances possible. “I told myself that I was asked to do this for a reason, that I need to take the audience reception as actual constructive criticism and not crash out. It was too amazing an opportunity not to go one hundred per cent full throttle.”
With a tequila soda in hand, iKeda discusses a musical palette shaped by everyone from Santigold to SOPHIE. However, much of her creativity is fuelled by the trusted circle of friends and artists around her. Fellow club scene regular Babymorocco encouraged her to try songwriting in 2024, leading to her debut single ‘Luv Drunk’: “It was such a far-away concept, going into the studio and writing, but he started doing it, and I saw how quickly he got good.”
Her childhood was divided between Tottenham’s “concrete jungle” and life aboard a houseboat in the peaceful surroundings of Cambridge, giving iKeda an early instinct for creating stories. During her teenage years, she tried her hand at short fiction before studying visual art at Central Saint Martins. “It’s so powerful when you can take something into your own hands and write these things which you wish could happen in real life,” she says while discussing why visuals remain so essential to her creative identity. “I love just being in a world when I’m listening to music.”
That sense of entering another reality sits at the heart of ‘Bangs N Braces’, her forthcoming second EP. The project steps away from the Y2K dance pop character of her 2024 debut, ‘Pretty Little Problem’, and moves deeper into dancehall and funky house. It also serves as her personal declaration of the “gyal dem” lifestyle. In iKeda’s eyes, the meaning of being a “gyal” is not limited by gender or sexuality: “It’s all about one goal, moving toward complete liberation. It’s about maximising disruption, taking up space regardless of if someone has a problem with it.”
That fearless attitude has helped her explore sounds she previously felt nervous about approaching. “Jamaicans can be very perfectionistic about their dancehall, so I’ve always been a little bit intimidated,” she admits before explaining how the music honours her Windrush heritage. “I’ve always wanted to make this kind of music, and I’m finally at the place where I’m confident in exploring that.”
The result is a sound iKeda has named “bubblegum riddim”, blending electronic club pop with dancehall rhythms. “I feel an obsession with music that’s very effervescent and bubbly – it’s like your head is fizzing.” Beneath that sugary surface, however, lies something much rougher. “A lot of pop music is meant to sound quite tuned,” she says. “But with bubblegum riddim, there’s an edge. I love how in a lot of ’90s dancehall, the female vocals are a little off-key, almost fighting the beat.”
“I want to put on an actual production. I want to make bodies of work with coherent eras”
Across ‘Bangs N Braces’, this refreshed creative perspective moves between the grime coloured intensity of ‘Red Red’ and the bright dancehall energy of ‘Go!’ and ‘Meoww’. ‘Tiger Tiger’ captures both iKeda’s vivid imagination and growing confidence. “I was going down memory lane with old childhood books, and I saw The Tiger Who Came To Tea. The story morphed into this whole thing, like there’s this secret club and you can only go if you’re a bad girl.” Alongside surreal visions of mysterious potions and twisting white rabbits, the song reflects a broader personal transformation: “It’s part of my new path of just completely feeling myself.”
With the EP arriving later this month, iKeda says her newfound confidence has brought a welcome sense of freedom that is now influencing how she writes. “I just want to make feel-good music because that’s how I’m feeling right now,” she says. Even though her songs capture the carefree thrill of club pop, she treats simple melodies with genuine seriousness. “People don’t understand how hard it is to write a catchy hook without it turning into slop,” she explains. Her perfectionist nature keeps her focused on every small element, including “the little intros and interludes, which labels don’t care about but that listeners love”.
Although she is not ready to describe herself as a pop star, her ambitions suggest she already possesses the imagination and determination required to become one. “I just want to improve everything. I want to put on an actual production. I want to make bodies of work with coherent eras,” she says when asked about her future, revealing the constant drive behind her creativity. “Right now I’m trusting more in my ideas. I’m eternally grateful for all of the good times I’ve had, but I definitely have more to say.”
iKeda’s ‘Bangs N Braces’ EP arrives August 28 through Orbit Artist Group.
