“At The Disco” by Madam Bandit

Born into a rigorously Christian family in the coastal redwoods of Northern California, faith has become a keystone of Madam Bandit’s artistic endeavours – both in the celebratory sense, and in terms of deconstructing it and showing the way such a lifestyle can bring negatives as well as positives.

Reflecting the fluidity of her identity, she began her musical career under her given name of Mindy Gledhill, which led to her accruing significant success as an indie artist. Yet recording music as Mindy Gledhill wasn’t quite enough to satisfy her creative ambitions, and so she has turned to an alter ego and a brand new style of music as an intriguing means of branching out.

The resulting EP, ‘Punch You in The Face’, releasing on 13th May, is a vibrant expression of the liberation this new identity has given her, spinning her overriding concern with faith in an entirely new direction. The lead single is “At The Disco”, for which Notion has an exclusive preview.

“At The Disco” is both what it says on the tin and much more, a bold and bright slice of classic synth-pop that has fun getting lost in the moment, and also an expression of personal emancipation from social expectations of what is expected of women, particularly those brought up in religious institutions.

On the track, Madam Bandit says,  “I grew up as the 8th child in a family of 9 kids. We had our own wonderfully bizarre family customs, one of which was a disco dance on Christmas Eve. It was intoxicatingly fun to play dress up and dance with my siblings — pure childhood dopamine. Later in my teens, I lived in Spain and as a Mormon teen, I’d go to the “discotecas” with my friends but never drank or tried drugs. I lived for the reflections of the mirror ball on my face as I danced under the array of flashing lights. I wanted to capture the utter rush and joy of those dance-filled memories in this song.”