Chutney’s Top 4 Influences for Toxic Moonlight

Half of us are kids of the 90s, so Britney was an icon in our formative years and her music is deeply nostalgic. ‘Toxic’, released in 2003 (incidentally also around the time half of us entered puberty), made a huge splash when it came out and remains a banger - Vogue just dubbed it the “greatest pop video ever made”.
The earworm high string riff was the seed from which our cover sprung. Ilan Kidron from The Potbelleez, our guest vocalist for the track, commented that it sounded “really klezmer” - so we ran with it. (Incidentally, the riff is actually sampled from a Bollywood score…but what’s an augmented second between friends?)

Something about the darkness and (toxic?) romance of the first movement of Beethoven’s famous Piano Sonata No.14 in C# Minor (‘Moonlight’) rendered it a natural bedfellow for Britney’s hit song. I actually nicked Beethoven’s descending bassline and stuck it under the ‘Toxic’ verses, lending those moments an additional tension and intensity.
I also incorporated Beethoven in the introduction and in a brief instrumental interlude halfway through the track.

Horas are the whirling circle dances you might have seen/been dragged into at Jewish weddings and bar/bat mitzvahs. (The dance originates in Romania and is shared across a few cultures.) The defining feature of the genre is insane energy, perpetuated by unrelenting ‘oom-cha’s in the rhythm section - here’s a good example.
We have heard, danced and known this genre since birth, so it was easy for us to play the ‘Toxic’ choruses as a hora.

We are big fans of Muse, and we draw a lot of general inspiration from their raw power and love of minor keys.
Specifically in ‘Toxic Moonlight’, the post-apocalyptic stadium symphonic rock vibes we created in the verses probably owe something to our long-term ingestion of tracks like Uprising. Matt Bellamy’s outrageous Rachmaninov Piano Concerto-esque interlude in Butterflies and Hurricanes also gave us permission to recruit long-dead classical composers in service of contemporary alt-rock, not that we really needed it 😉