Robin Kester - Honeycomb Shades (2023)

If fear keeps you from doing things, your world becomes smaller. Overcoming that fear by courting new, sometimes unnerving situations is the premise of Honeycomb Shades, the debut album by Dutch recording artist and musician Robin Kester. Kester’s experimental pop exudes a hazy euphoria and dark tension: the thrill of your synapses firing on all cylinders before turning into fully-formed thought.

Garnering widespread attention with her mini-album This Is Not A Democracy last year – with airplay from BBC 6 Radio, KCRW and KEXP – Kester has drawn a wide range of comparisons, ranging from Portishead, Broadcast to Julia Holter. Though operating on a comparable sonic wavelength, Robin Kester is a distinct voice coming fully into her own on Honeycomb Shades.

Drifting between the outer realms of chamber pop, electronic music and psychedelic rock, Kester writes wholly adventurous music. Not adventurous per se in the naive sense, since there’s always some element of mystery on the prowl. Having moved around from town to town a lot as a child, many of her songs reframe past impressions into wandering reflections, often inspired by specific moments and sceneries.

Opening cut “Fries And Ice Cream '', for instance, exhumes a childhood memory once lived through a rose-colored lens, now altered by new facts. Through the caverns of its sinister trip hop atmospherics, Kester is clawing for a source of nurturing light. The limber indie pop of “Leave Now”, – which premiered on Lauren Leverne’s BBC6 show –, tells the tale of a chaotic trip to Vietnam, a rude awakening of new sensations going into overdrive.

Some songs on Honeycomb Shades resonate like acute snapshots in time: “Cat 13” recollects a moment of staying in the car to avoid an uncomfortable place, using sun-kissed melodies as mediator rather than an escape. The crystalline “Skinny Kids'' revisits a childhood friend’s living room as an adult, affected by the objects and furniture that signify the incessant passage of time.

The material Kester developed for the album involved a process of creating, interacting and reassessing. All the songs were recorded and produced with Marien Dorleijn, chief songwriter of acclaimed indie rockers Moss. Tinkering with sounds and sketches in Dorleijn’s studio – a former psychiatric ward – the duo arranged the songs, handed them over to her band to create a physical live energy to the songs. In addition, Emily Cross (Cross Record, Loma) came on board to record clarinet parts. After putting the finishing touches, producer/engineer Ali Chant (Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey) did additional post-production and mixing for Honeycomb Shades, while Joe Lambert (Sharon Van Etten, The Antlers) was called in for the mastering.

The majestic “Celeste” underwent several transformations before reaching its full potential, combining a humid, latin groove with the icy alternative pop leanings of Cocteau Twins. The staccato sax stabs suggest a menace lurking just beneath the pale misty surface. “Dead End” frolics into a playful, static-laden krautrock pulse before an eerie pitched-down voice is introduced. Channeling Boards of Canada’s nonpareil pop abstractions, the macabre instrumental “Zwanzig Zwanzig”, striking like a forceful opening of the blinders after long spells of solitude.

The translucid folk of “Hands” and the enigmatic dream pop of “Blinds” allude to situations and spaces that are decisively familiar and earthbound: a dim-lit bedroom, or a hospital bed with whispered voices creeping through the wall. Kester’s music wraps these intimate experiences in a surrealistic fog, depicting them almost as abstract dreams that contain new wisdoms and revelations. Honeycomb Shades renders the motions we go through into a golden lifeline: an album to hold close by amidst the enveloping chaos outside.