Pickle Darling has always existed just outside of the periphery. In a heightened time of fast music, algorithmic consumption and rapid virality, Lukas Mayo (they/them) has remained focused on the album. Their discography is a reflection of their creative evolution, and they deliberately look for ways to push sonic boundaries from release to release. Since debuting with Bigness in 2019 followed by Cosmonaut in 2021, Mayo has curated a catalog that is deeply personal and strangely tactile, where tiny, unexpected details—an off-kilter loop, a whispered aside, the warmth of an old Casio—become as crucial as melody itself. Their 2023 LP Laundromat was a precise and polished expansion of that world, a record that felt like it had been carefully placed behind glass. It garnered praise from Mojo, Rolling Stone Australia, The Line of Best Fit, and led to a live performance on the beloved New Zealand children’s TV program, What Now.
Their fourth album, Bots, by contrast, is unruly and full of static: a collection of songs that feel like they could only ever exist on scratched CD-Rs passed between friends. Self-recorded in their home studio in Christchurch, New Zealand, Bots finds Mayo taking a scalpel to their own songwriting. Instead of simply playing guitar, they recorded each note individually, then arranged them one by one. Songs were stretched, chopped, reversed. Some ideas started as "unlistenable garbage" before morphing into something unexpectedly beautiful. If a song felt too straightforward, Mayo had to mess it up. “After Laundromat, I was tired of ‘the song,’” Mayo explains. “I wanted to avoid capturing a performance as much as possible, everything had to be fragments, and I wanted to show as much of the recording and editing process as possible, leaving all the seams exposed.” The result is an album that feels like a glitch in the system, pushing against past constraints while embracing the weird, beautiful mess of making something new.
