Black Bordello’s second album White Bardo embodies a state of welcome oblivion for the band’s founder and songwriter Sienna Bordello. These songs mark a point of surrender; to the laws of nature, to love as an unquenchable sovereign entity, to profound notions of divinity, mythology and quantum physics, to the rush of mortality. Moreover, on White Bardo Black Bordello looks way beyond what we encounter at face value.
Across nine tracks, the band adopt a more crisp and primal guise, bottlenecking Sienna’s seething, macabre lyricism into more potent, piercing outpours. “Our first album was an experience of me finishing adolescence and realising that the adult world was more laced with misogyny and other disparities,” Sienna reflects, “I became fed up and bored by earthly politics and semantics, hence my current fascination with the metaphysical world and outer space”.
Since releasing their first record, Black Bordello have become one of the most promising burgeoning groups in the UK. Spearheaded by Sienna’s vivid, fragmented lyricism, their metamorphic brand of alternative rock is enchanted with elements of vaudevillian chamber pop, post-punk, avant-garde music and modern blues. The group – composed of Sienna Bordello, Daniel Gowers, Jerome Alexandre, Melody Wayfare, Indigo Pearce and Francis Wolfe – earned a strong live reputation, granting a touring support slot for The Libertines, earning airplay on BBC6 from Steve Lamacq.
Black Bordello have built a steady grassroots following since their formation, allowing them to bend their live shows to their own distinct sensibility – a rallying against the way bands are often treated, as something interchangeable slotted in to bring in patrons. So in March 2024, the band introduced Black Bordello’s Chaos Cabaret, an event that sold out Paper Dress Vintage. It showcased musical performances, clowning, set design, theatre and poetry.
“Everyone was given a mask on the way in,” Sienna says. “Which meant that the audience looked like something out of Eyes Wide Shut. There was a massive red piñata in the shape of a drop of blood which the audience destroyed upon request. It was filled with confetti, glitter, cigarettes and band merch.”
The group’s lauded self-titled LP – featuring singles “Backache”, “Drones” and “Leeches” – expressed Sienna’s piercing reflections on sexuality, society and womanhood. White Bardo sucks all the gravity out of the room, veering her songwriting towards a more exploratory outward-looking angle. Lead single “Nunhead” (named after the famous cemetery in Southeast London, where many of Sienna’s family members are buried) masquerades its simmering fatalism with a joyful saunter, as Sienna observes the bizarre polyphony of leisure and loss. Writing the song during the pandemic, the sight of mums drinking Prosecco and kids playing with toys left on other children’s graves struck a strange chord.
“I complained about this to a local neighbourhood group and it got in the paper. There were three or four different online papers and then one in prin, which characterised me as this hysterical mentalist. I wasn’t best pleased about getting in the paper for this reason. But it led the council to let me use the cemetery to make a music video about its gentrification… so that was a silver lining!”
White Bardo brims with likewise cheeky energy, a flood of stubborn rejoicing that washes over feelings of despair and numbness. “Acid Mary” pushes and pulls listeners between allure and austerity, rapturously yielding itself to the forces of nature. The carnivalesque “Love Is A Joke” and the grandiloquent British Invasion-indebted “Smoke & Hiss” are both blunt and debonair in their testimonials of love and heartbreak. Sienna interrogates the unsolvable mysteries of attraction, and the mixed signals between mind and body, “Your mind might have come to some conclusions. But the body always keeps the score. And it knows things that we don’t know; it learns and reacts in ways that we can’t understand.”
“The Garden of Earthly Delights” details the powerlessness of the body against the brain, laying bare her own emancipation from the trauma of abuse. Sienna comments on the difficulty many may face in breaking the cycle of abuse, as “some self-conscious voice in you insists that the pain is necessary or what you deserve. You view your own romantic life like it’s a program on television, and the characters may not be ones you’ve chosen or written for yourself.”
The barb-wired pounce of “1331”, recalling Siouxsie & The Banshees’ fork-tongued frenzy, serendipitously talks about holding onto symbols, patterns and numerologies as tethers to heft oneself from mental disarray. “Jupiter” is Sienna’s ode to the largest planet in our solar system, finding hope in the truth’s larger gravitational pull against propaganda and lies from the puppet masters of the world. Concurrently, the “End Of Reality” – sounding like Prefab Sprout filtered through Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice – celebrates that sweet flux of your own imagination running rampant before solidifying into everyday fight-or-flight realities. That type of glee helped materialise White Bardo’s opening title track: a flippant fucking about with a chatbot that somehow morphed into a spoken word vignette about the afterlife, performed by guitarist Jerome Alexandre.
Indeed, White Bardo is Black Bordello’s concentrated attempt to unshackle from the obvious beaten paths, exploring alternative vantage points with an open-heart and a pinch of ink-black wit. One could even call it Sienna’s default state, recalibrated anew: growing up with roots in Cyprus and Sicily, she was exposed to Mediterranean and Middle-eastern musical styles before her interest in popular music came into play. Brandishing a vocal background in both opera and pre-war jazz music, different art forms and belief systems were always willing participants of the same dramaturgical dance. With a life lived ‘left-off-centre’ from quote unquote normalcy, one can design a pocket universe where all that shapes you can finally make sense.
“And that’s why the album is called White Bardo,” Sienna concludes. “It’s a positive escape route that came about from negative occurrences. After failed therapy sessions, I learned Transcendental Meditation, Tibetan Buddhism, the Book of the Dead and started reading the Bhagavad Gita and essays on quantum physics. These texts as well as being in situations where I witnessed death first hand caused me to wonder about the temporary nature of this reality. It’s true that in hospices they know about the Bardo because they see people enter it and stay there for weeks on end. Neither dead nor alive. And sometimes in that space we see truly phenomenal things occur. You could enter it any time just by settling your mind. The Bardo is not a morbid place but rather a waiting room or an emancipatory space. Some things may have to end, but joy lies in the fact that more things come then begin.”
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