While they differed in style and scope, this band’s signature works- Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, Misery Is a Butterfly, and 23-were united by a policy of swift and total immersion: Each led with a striking opening track that immediately thrust you into the album’s distinct three-dimensional sound, making it feel like you’ve been dropped into a film already in progress. Arriving nine years on from their last full-length release, Sit Down for Dinner is the life-saving dose of CPR that gets this band’s oxygen flowing and blood pumping again. Once the pandemic took hold, you could be forgiven for wondering if the band would still be standing on the other side of it. In 2019, Makino released her first solo album, by which point Blonde Redhead had all but ground to a halt. But that sort of frisson was in short supply on 2010’s Penny Sparkle and 2014’s Barragán, records that resembled mood boards of disparate sounds in search of songs, with little of the dramatic flair that powered the band’s previous transformations. In the stellar seven-album run from 1995’s serrated self-titled debut to 2007’s shimmering shoegaze odyssey 23, Blonde Redhead had successfully pivoted from no-wave noisemakers to arthouse-indie auteurs, all while sustaining a highwire balance of melodic whimsy and needling tension.

There was a certain cruel irony in the fact a song that began as a time-killing lark-recorded by singer Kazu Makino while her twin-brother accomplices Amedeo and Simone Pace were sleeping at the studio-would become the defining work of a group that’s otherwise taken such a methodical approach to their craft.

For the damaged coda clip