Praise for Pickle Darling:
“Pickle Darling’s music captures and inspires an intricate sense of wonder… with each new release Pickle Darling expands their charming sonic cosmos filled with vibrant, intimate bedroom-pop vignettes.” - Crack Magazine
"Built on bright synths and drum machines, it’s Mayo’s familiar off-kilter indie-pop, just a little bigger." - Rolling Stone AU/NZ
"'Bedroom-pop' wiz" - Under The Radar
"Christchurch’s Pickle Darling (Lukas Mayo) has gone epic... Early promise really flowering." - The Listener
Pickle Darling shares a final single 'Congratulations Champion' and re-announces their new album Bots (previously Battlebots) out 5th September via Father/Daughter Records. Lukas Mayo, the artist behind Pickle Darling, has always thrived in the margins, favouring quiet devotion over quick virality, patience over polish. On Bots, their most fractured and sonically unruly album to date, Mayo quite literally pushed their computer to its limits. Songs were layered until files became unopenable, and in some cases, abandoned entirely. It’s a fitting collapse for a record about emotional static, creative friction, and the strange beauty found in ruin.
'Congratulations Champion' is a timestamp of sorts; a mosaic of one-liners pulled from Mayo’s phone notes and set to a melody that slots in like a missing puzzle piece. It’s a song of small, specific heartbreaks, strung together with warmth and warped logic. The standout lyric, “You know I’m gonna love you still / Like black mold loves the windowsill,” lands somewhere between devotion and decay, a perfect encapsulation of Bots’ tone: earnest, unsettling, and strangely sweet. Out 5th September via Father/Daughter Records, Bots is the latest chapter in Pickle Darling’s ongoing exploration of how broken things can still feel whole.
Speaking on the track, Pickle Darling says: "This one collects a bunch of stand alone lines I’ve had on my phone. Some songs function purely as a timestamp for me, it has so many things in it that point to a specific moment in 2022. I was listening to a lot of R.E.M., at the time, I love melodies that kind of just ‘slot’ into place."
Mayo didn’t set out to break their laptop while making Bots, but in the end, the machine just couldn’t take it. Files became too heavy, too unwieldy, too layered with chopped-up guitar notes, warped voice memos, and fractured drum loops. Some songs weren’t finished so much as abandoned, because the computer simply refused to open them anymore. That moment felt fitting. An album about breaking apart, about friction and collapse, should probably come with a little destruction of its own.
Pickle Darling has always existed just outside of the periphery. In a heightened time of fast music, algorithmic consumption and rapid virality, Mayo has remained focused on the album. Their discography is a reflection of their creative evolution, and they deliberately look for ways to push sonic boundaries from release to release. Since debuting with Bigness in 2019 followed by Cosmonaut in 2021, Mayo has curated a catalog that is deeply personal and strangely tactile, where tiny, unexpected details—an off-kilter loop, a whispered aside, the warmth of an old Casio—become as crucial as melody itself. Their 2023 LP Laundromat was a precise and polished expansion of that world, a record that felt like it had been carefully placed behind glass. It garnered praise from Mojo, Rolling Stone Australia, The Line of Best Fit, and led to a live performance on the beloved New Zealand children’s TV program, What Now.
That friction of old and new, organic and digital, melody and noise is what drives Bots. Mayo drew inspiration from a strange, scattered lineage: Four Tet’s Rounds, The Books, Neneh Cherry’s Broken Politics, The Wrens’ Three types of reading ambiguity, but also the emotional directness of 2000s pop like Madonna’s Ray of Light and Robyn’s Body Talk. The album opens with 'Obsolete,' featuring a voice memo from songwriter Ava Mirzadegan. It takes a full two minutes before Mayo's voice emerges, hesitant but clear. Later, there's 'Massive Everything,' which Mayo describes as the closest they've ever come to writing a pop song. And then there’s Bots’ most striking couplet, from 'Congratulations Champion': "You know I’m gonna love you still / Like black mold loves the windowsill." It’s as sweet as a strawberry on the edge of rotting.
The title Bots itself is a reference to clashing ideologies—internally and externally, between past and present versions, between the desire to create something and the frustration of the process. It’s a reflection of how our thoughts never settle, how music is never really about one singular thing, how an album can hold a hundred tiny conflicts at once. And in that way, it mirrors life itself. It’s an album built from fragments, from warped sounds and half-memories, stitched together into something that still somehow pulses with life. It’s not just a standalone piece, it’s another chapter in the world Pickle Darling has been quietly building all along.
To mark the release, Pickle Darling will play a series of intimate in-store shows around Aotearoa – just Lukas and a guitar, stripped-back and tender:
September 5th – Slowboat Records, Wellington – 4.30pm
September 6th – Flying Out, Auckland – 2.00pm
September 11th – Penny Lane Records, Christchurch