Song You Need to Know: Chutney, ‘Toxic Moonlight’

When a press release describes a song as being a crossover between Beethoven and Britney Spears, of course you have to listen.

Punk collective Chutney have used elements of that unlikely pairing’s respective sounds in their new single, “Toxic Moonlight”, which releases on Tuesday, June 4th.

The Sydney band joined forces with The Potbelleez vocalist Ilan Kidron for the song, which fuses Britney’s classic 2003 hit “Toxic” with Beethoven’s masterful “Moonlight Sonata” (hence the song title).

“Toxic Moonlight” is layered with Chutney’s signature Eastern European/Middle Eastern flair; or as the band themselves put it, “It’s the illicit love child of Britney and Beethoven in a raucous Balkan bar – it’s bonkers.”

It was actually Kidron who initially sparked the song idea, after the Potbelleez frontman noted the klezmer-esque qualities of “Toxic”. When Chutney violinist Ben Adler then discovered “Moonlight Sonata”, the end result became tangible.

“It was 2021 and we had a gig lined up with Ilan,” Adler explains. “We were in a reprieve between COVID lockdowns so we’d developed a certain nihilism that, in retrospect, was highly conducive to unfettered creativity. I was talking with Ilan about songs he’d like to sing with us, and he observed that the string riff in ‘Toxic’ sounds “really klezmer” – we only discovered years later that it’s actually a Bollywood sample! 

“Anyway, Ilan’s suggestion was all I needed to klezmer-ify Britney’s song. Something about its darkness and (toxic) romance then led me to Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’, especially after I realised that importing Beethoven’s descending bassline might open up a whole new set of possibilities for the otherwise pretty harmonically static ‘Toxic’ verses. I sketched up a chart and we tweaked it in rehearsal, at a gig and in the studio into its present form”.

But the key ingredient in all of this is that “Toxic Moonlight” doesn’t feel like a limp YouTuber-made “comic” mashup; instead, Chutney have brought the sampled songs – born hundreds of years apart – together to make something excitingly modern.

“It’s rarely a good idea to take on recording and releasing a cover unless you’re going to spin it really differently. We did ‘Toxic Moonlight’ live a few times and it was just heroic fun. And when the climax goes bananas, it still feels like people are going to start throwing chairs around the venue. The arrangement should sound disjunct, what with the sections contrasting so much, but it rides like a velvet clad rodeo bull, smooth and bucking in chaos,” Kidron says.