New Music Friday can be a lot. That's why every week we cut it down to the songs you need to hear for PLAY, our new music edit, and deliver a new cover feature to go alongside it. This week... Banoffee.
There was a year Martha Brown trained on a heavy bag for about four hours a day. "No idea," she says, asked to rate her boxing out of ten now. "Probably a one these days, definitely better than my boyfriend who complains about footwork like it's the worst thing that's ever happened." Footwork, for the record, is apparently 'quite important'.
Brown, who records as Banoffee, played in HRH Queen Charli xcx's band on Taylor Swift's stadium tour in the days before everyone was swapping diss tracks, and the 'Muscles' EP is her first full release of her own since 2021. In between, her name mostly turned up in other people's small print, including a co-write on BAYLI's 'Monster' in March. The EP took its time partly because she was DJing a lot, and partly because of the year the title track came out of.
The song, you see, started 'all the way back' in 2022. "I originally wrote 'Muscles' quite some time ago," she explains. "I had an abortion just before Roe v Wade was overturned." The US Supreme Court ruling came on 24th June that year.
"It was a very strange time to be resting my body, feeling so incredibly fragile in a way only someone who's been through it could know, all the while seeing people celebrate that what I'd just done would no longer be accessible to so many," she says. "That year just sort of consumed me in what felt like some epic cruel test," she continues. "I was assaulted at my workplace and asked not to report it. I was broke as all hell."
So the training went up, to those four hours a day on a heavy bag, "until my hands would ache and my shins would bleed". "I just got mad I guess," she says, understandably. "And I didn't want that rage to be anyone else's problem, I had to find a way through it and that came with a lot of songs and many hours in the gym." The quiet on the release schedule belongs to the same stretch. "I had a couple of really hard years just with my own mental health and it felt just too much to be vulnerable publicly," she explains. "So I just took a back seat and started producing and writing for other people so that I still got to make music. I just didn't have to back it up with my face on it."
"Rage is part of us. It's unserviced grief"
— Martha Brown
She boxes a lot less now. "I actually went so hard that I gave myself some sort of epic hormone imbalance and got really sick which is kind of in its own way a bit funny," she says. "But that time in the gym and the studio really got me through a moment of pure disbelief in humankind and I feel very grateful to it every time I sing 'Muscles'."
The song she is grateful to sits first on the EP, dropped on its own as a single before the other six songs arrived. It certainly carries the gym with it with a title that reads as an instruction to a body, delivered by the person who spent that year issuing it to herself. Four hours a day for most of a year comes to something over a thousand hours on a bag. The EP that came out the other side runs nineteen minutes. Those punches are a concentrated force.
The word boxer has stuck anyway. "Am I? Well I guess I used to box a lot," she says. "But never in a way where I'd call myself a boxer! I think everyone should try it. Rage is part of us. It's unserviced grief. I don't ever want to let that sit in my body and there's something so powerful about letting it out in a way that's harmless." She will, she adds, "always consider it a part of my practice I guess, because I know it's there when I need it".
"I just didn't have to back it up with my face on it"
— Martha Brown
Bodies are the record's subject, and she says she knew that from the first songs rather than on a final playback. "Something felt clear from the jump," she says; 'Started Killing Again' and 'Ballet Flats' "are songs that came with a story for sure". The others gave the theme up later. "It's interesting listening back and hearing themes jump out at me now from all of the tracks really," she says. "I've always been a very tactile person, and also felt extremely othered a lot of my life. So that's a weird combination that can feel like an internal wrestling match - being someone who's so bodily yet often feels pretty detached or in a bubble."
'Ballet Flats' is the warmest thing here: a pleasingly speedy BPM underneath the a relatively modest wish list for modern pop. "I just wanna be a girl who's got her bank sorted," goes the hook, before the shoes of the title. It's certainly one of the singles of the year, and the detached-but-bodily combination she describes makes it, a club tempo spent on wanting a decent wedge in the saver account. 'Get Yourself Off' was made with Ninajirachi in 2024 and held back until April; its lyric sheet is a night out that goes wonky in the correct order, keys left in the cab, a face licked "like a stamp". (At least it's not a crisp packet - Ed.)
Then she started playing the songs to other people's bodies. Loose is her monthly party in Los Angeles; "like having little test groups that you can work with every month," she says. "I've tested out multiple versions of tracks at Loose."
"I've learnt a lot throwing parties, most importantly that you don't need a big name - you just need people's trust," she explains. "If you can grow an audience that trusts your taste you are in a great place." Loose doesn't keep to one genre, and the crowd that turns up every month, she says, "have taught me so much in remembering that I can do that with my solo stuff too".
She released the record on the same basis. We'd rarely put this in a piece of Proper Music Journalism (we own a cardigan and everything), but the copyright line on 'Muscles' reads ℗ 2026 Banoffee. An artist who spent a good while keeping her face off the front has come back with a record that has her own name on the back. "I'm not worried about how it's received anymore," she offers, "I just want to have fun and that is a change that I recommend everyone to make."
"No one is honest about what a mind fuck being in music is," she says. "I don't like pretending about it. It is definitely an industry that will build you up at the same time and swallow you whole." What has changed, she reckons, is that she is now honest with herself about what brings her joy in it, and the answer is writing a good song, whether or not anyone hears it. "I have so many songs that aren't released, but they have served a purpose for me," she says. "That moment in the studio when you think something is working - it's like the best pill you've ever taken. It's a high of a lifetime and that's what keeps me in it." And the DJing counts too. "Good music is just the best and if I get to write it, or play other people's music - as long as it's music I like, I'm bloody happy."
"I want to make a stupid amount and get it all out like tomorrow"
— Martha Brown
There is more new music due at the start of next year, "some of my funnest work yet", and more besides. "Maybe too much," she admits, asked whether she is feeling prolific again. "I feel like I want to do everything at once. I have more music coming out, as well as a couple of cool projects with other people. I want to make a stupid amount and get it all out like tomorrow." The first of it is 'Hard Girl Cut', a leftfield rework of 'Muscles' featuring Marchante dropping today; but even as she graciously granted Dork an audience, she was already at work on the next record, which "basically means listening to a million snare drums for hours until I find the perfect one or - throw my computer out the window!"
So after all of that, Banoffee still spends hours in a row on one thing. These days it's a snare drum rather than a punching bag, and the computer, for now, is still safe indoors.
Banoffee's track 'Muscles (Hard Girl Cut)' featuring Marchante is out now.
