Premiere: Hot As Sun, ‘It Was Bananas’

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Hot As Sun

Pop duo Hot As Sun burned brightly from 2012 to ’16, releasing an EP and a full-length, “Night Time Sound Desire” (2013), for Last Gang Records, then another EP after the project became a solo venture.

A strange confluence of the pandemic, creative urges, motherhood and a rekindled friendship reunited principals Jamie Jackson and Deborah Stoll, although they are stationed on opposite coasts. They rekindled the spark to — true to their name — turn up the temperature on their playful, subversive and sometimes-steamy synth-punk. Working with Justin Meldal-Johnsen, who handled bass and mixing duties, the duo have completed a three-song EP, “It Was Bananas.”

The title track, out this week, is as frenetic as our times. “Because, really, everything is bananas,” Stoll says.

Since we last heard from Hot As Sun, Jackson has worked composing music for film and television (she’s currently scoring the upcoming Apple TV drama, “Bad Monkey”). Stoll is a widely published writer, working on her second book for Harper Collins, about the rise of female, LGBTQ and non-binary skateboarders, due to be published in 2023.

“During the lockdown,” Jackson says, “T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo and Rachel Yoder’s book, ‘Night Bitch,’ inspired me to pick up a bass and just get wild and honest. Motherhood, especially during a pandemic, is complicated and I felt lost creatively, but as the songs started to come … I realized being a mom was very f*cking rock ’n’ roll. With the help of Deborah, I tapped back in. She always lights the match.”

Says Stoll: “The moment Jamie and I started writing together again, it was euphoric pandemonium. Lyrics and sounds and images and reminiscences of our long-lost L.A. summer nights. To me, ‘It Was Bananas’ embodies our combined psyches processing lunatic lives the best way we know how — by turning them into primal, sweaty, riotous songs.”

“It Was Bananas” arrives with an animated video by Patricia Luna — it’s bananas, too.

||| Stream: “It Was Bananas”

||| Previously: “I Can Feel Your Love,” “When We Fell,” “Dahnce to the Beat;” “The Desert Song” video; “Come Come”