Bar Pandora announces new EP and shares new single 'Dynamic'
New EP Recreate This is due out on November 24th
“Cathartic alt-pop that manages to be simultaneously off-kilter and melodious” The Times
Bar Pandora is the stage name of UK alt-pop artist Charlie Tophill. On November 24th, she is set to release Recreate This, her second EP. Bar Pandora’s melodious alt-pop is playfully sewn together from the offcuts of personal experience. Field recordings, journal entries and improvised fragments bop bewitchingly along to a rich undercurrent of harmonic synths, guitars and dynamic beats.
Bar Pandora’s 2022 self-titled debut EP and subsequent singles have earned the project early critical acclaim, with BBC 6 music’s Amy Lamé, Tom Robinson and Steve Lamacq, BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and The Times being amongst her supporters.
When alt-pop artist Charlie Tophill first started performing under the name Bar Pandora in 2021, she was seeking to redress the balance of a life shadowed by self-imposed limitation and baseless inhibition. She took the name from a literary cafe in La Latina, Madrid, where she used to hang out with her friends talking life, literature and feminism over red wine and fizzy sweets. Retrospectively inspired by the empowerment these friendships engendered, she started experimenting with her music, using field recordings, sampling, improvisation and journaling to create captivating electronic alt-pop out of unlikely couplings.
Her new single ‘Dynamic’, a track about the push and pull between the anxiety and joys of living, sees Bar Pandora step into the world of shimmering synth pop. “I get a lot of joy out of life,” says Tophill. “Sometimes I feel like it’s the simplest thing in the world just to have fun and be happy, and I get so frustrated if the people around me aren’t on board when I just want to laugh and dance and sing. But then I can so easily swing the other way, and get wracked with anxiety, stress, anger. This song started as a frustrated plea to someone in my life, reminding them that enjoying life takes a little work sometimes, but that it’s worth it.”
Recreate This sees Bar Pandora continue her work with jungle producer Simply Dread. “Writing this EP has been an interesting process, and very different to the last one which had no expectation attached to it,” explains Tophill. “When I started making these tracks, I knew I wanted to push myself further, to do more and say more, but not to kill it with overthinking.”
“The tracks on this EP emerged in a cycle of creating, destroying, then creating again. I would write a track, tear it up and stick it back together again and in the process I got a little deeper into what was driving me. The end result is a collection of tracks that I had a lot of fun making and also turned out to be pretty personal,” says Tophill. “If you pick it apart this EP is really a catalogue of my flaws, fears and insecurities. For me Bar Pandora has always been about following the feels, and a lot of feels happened while I was writing these tracks.”
