Todd Kilby spent years working as a circus acrobat before he committed to songwriting, travelling and performing his way around the world first. That’s an unusual route into indie rock, and it turns up in the music more than you might expect. Recording as Banquet Darling out of Muloobinba/Newcastle in Australia, he writes songs that clearly have a physical response in mind rather than a purely contemplative one.
“Shivers and Echoes” is the third and final single before his second album, “NOW,” due in August, which makes it the last look inside before the whole thing opens up.
What “Shivers and Echoes” Says About NOW
The single refuses to sit still inside any one genre, which appears to be the point. There’s an indie rock foundation holding it together, post-punk sharpness around the edges, psychedelic colour worked into the texture, and underneath all of it a groove that never lets the track settle into anything static.
The rhythm section carries most of the weight. The drumming is loose and faintly mischievous rather than metronomic, the kind of playing that pushes at you instead of just keeping time, and the bass moves with enough spring in it to make sitting still feel like the wrong response. Guitars arrive dirty and abrasive, but there’s piano tucked in underneath catching the light every so often, which is the detail that keeps the whole thing from being purely grit.
Kilby’s vocal is the other half of the equation. He sings this one low and close, favouring insinuation over declaration, and the multi-tracked layers stacked behind him give the choruses a size the verses deliberately withhold. The subject is more particular than generic desire, too. Kilby is writing about what sits underneath a tidy surface, the ordinary street lined with ordinary houses, and the considerably less ordinary intensity going on inside them once the doors are shut. It’s a song about love and connection approached from an angle most writers don’t bother with, and the arrangement enacts that pull rather than just describing it.
What’s most impressive is the discipline in how the track handles tension. It builds and keeps building without ever cashing in, sustaining a forward pressure that refuses to resolve into the big release you spend the whole song bracing for. The method is repetition rather than escalation, a returning figure altered in small increments until the tiniest shift in the rhythm starts landing like an event. That withholding is the entire trick, and it’s considerably harder to pull off than a straightforward climax would be. There’s also a cinematic quality to how the mood is managed, a sense of scene-setting that has more in common with film scoring than with rock songwriting, even while the arrangement stays deliberately compact. Nothing here is reaching for spectacle. It works at close range instead, and it lodges in your head precisely because it never raises its voice to get there.
As a preview, it tells you something specific about what’s coming. Three singles deep, the throughline isn’t a sound so much as a refusal to commit to one, and a consistent instinct for making that restlessness danceable rather than difficult. If “NOW” holds that balance across a full record, Kilby will have made something genuinely hard to file, which on the evidence here is exactly what he’s after.
Final Thoughts
The title turns out to double as a description of how the song operates. The shiver is the immediate, physical part, the thing that gets you moving before you’ve decided to. The echo is whatever is still rattling around an hour after it finishes. “Shivers and Echoes” does what a closing single ought to do, which is leave you impatient for the album rather than satisfied without it. Banquet Darling has built a corner of alternative music that doesn’t much resemble anyone else’s, and “NOW” looks like the fullest statement of it yet.
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