Maxwell Byrne started 1tbsp in 2021, pulling from house, reggaeton, synth-pop, techno and other pieces of global club music. The project grew out of his earlier work as , where he became known as a songwriter/producer and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, for BAYNK’s ‘Adolescence’. 

1tbsp emerged as an offshoot and has since outgrown that brief, with sold-out headline shows across Australia, Europe and North America.

Debut album ‘big soaps’ is a cumulative rendering of Byrne’s repertoire in the past few years, made in a charged moment shaped by recession and cultural backlash.

New single ‘Carottes’ captures the album’s prevailing themes – a raw confessional about not knowing yourself, told through expired vegetables, a messy apartment, and a body that feels like a stranger’s. Sung in French with a Korean bridge, it turns the menial rituals of daily life into a tender reckoning with self-alienation.

The track came to fruition when Byrne and the French artist miki had roughly two hours together before she left on tour. In that window, they wrote three songs, two of which appear on the album. “We really clicked instantly,” Byrne says. “miki has great taste.”

‘Carottes’ started with one of miki’s soundbites, which Byrne chopped up to make the track’s main synth chords. Byrne took cues from Greek music at the time of recording, particularly 2007 album, ‘Remastered 1’ by Stereo Nova. Synth chords glisten rather than strike in a weightless haze of French-pop romance in the lineage of Air’s ‘Sexy Boy’ and Air France’s ‘Collapsing at Your Doorstep’.

Tune in now.