binki

Baraka Ongeri (Binki) is always watching: his new EP Antennae is a collection of off-the-cuff, on-the-nose anecdotes that see him zero on where he stands within the landscape that surrounds him. A first generation American whose family is from Kenya, he grew up in Pennsylvania before moving to New York in 2018 after getting a degree in acting at UNC Greensboro. He retains a sense of drama and voyeurism within his songs, which are often short and deliberately claustrophobic, punctuated with one or two specific lines that imbed themselves in the listener’s head. 

The product of sessions across London, Los Angeles and New York in 2021, Antennae was influenced by the restlessness and constant movement that came with extensive touring supporting the likes of Glass Animals, Role Model and Gus Dapperton. Taking shape from the vantage point of hotel rooms across the country, to his downtown New York apartment at home, they maintain the anxious energy that permeates the performer’s life. It was only when Ongeri had a month off after tour that he was able to get in the headspace to fully connect the dots between what songs cut deepest into his feelings of inescapable isolation and instability. The resulting EP amps up his frustrations towards the overexposure that comes with being constantly in proximity to other people, on or offline. 

“Baby I’m a rocket ship / how you gonna try and cage me in / I don’t want to talk or mediate,” he elucidates in EP highlight “Rocket Ship”: “picture me alone, I just like to monologue dancing on my own.” “Rocket Ship” was written in a day, and the stream-of-consciousness melodies of all four tracks that make up Antennae together became the perfect fit, sounding effortless in a way that belies the often unsettling lyrical undertones and their initial scattered creation. Even more compact-sounding than some of his previous work, the songs are clear-cut and bare-bones like a gut-punch of clarity at full-speed ahead. 

“Cities have a way of pushing people away,” Ongeri admits, and on Antennae he ruminates on the constant distractions that can detrimentally affect his relationships with others. He digs deeper into the unintended consequences of spending more and more time inside or online, and the juxtaposition of social media creating both a window into other people’s lives while at the same time being a superficial and performative representation of how people see each other and themselves. Opener “Hotel Window” is Ongeri at his most bitingly self-deprecating: “I dig your foot inside my head / I wish, I wish it wouldn’t twist” he deadpans, contemplating the misleadingly idyllic environment around him while he’s plagued with overthinking. 

Still, Ongeri maintains “emotion is the guiding force,” and the insularity of his music is his own form of intimacy. Admitting he’s often the first to be guarded and put up a wall, the songs feel like “a safe way to talk about things.” Ongeri’s music has always been very much a product of his own independence, beginning from the choice to move on his own to the city as well as a reflection of his own thoughts on the world around him: while often upbeat and punchy sonically the contrasting lyrics harbor a bleaker kind of emptiness, where sunny optimism is replaced by the reality of the mundane. Melancholic EP closer “Doomsday” was written toying with the idea “if you’d want to know the end” (“these days I just wanna know what I’m in for”), and is a justifiably cynical outlook at both modern relationships and the uncertain path to the future. Binki has always been a solo project, and the EP sees him wrestle with his independence and question how much he needs from other people, whether his friends or the solace of a sexual fantasy. “Freakin’” details the push and pull of a hookup, held up by skittering hi-hats and an irresistibly danceable beat, where he oscillates between “feeling like myself again” and “trying to be a man but I’m ill-equipped.” 

“Songs should be high stakes,” he emphasizes, and Antennae sounds like Ongeri’s biggest risk (and greatest reward) yet. Although early catchy singles like “Heybb!” and “Landline” were always filled with clever clues and sonic inventions, Antennae is a bolder statement of intent where his internal world comes alive with intention, while maintaining his trademark style of idiosyncratic indie pop that stays forward-thinking. It’s Binki finally coming into focus as an artist through the choices he makes and his own vision that remains singular. “I’ve always been very efficient with creating stuff,” he admits, but like gems painstakingly selected from an internal cache, these songs shine the brightest. “There’s no love songs” in this collection, he says, “but it’s still something real.”