Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	83/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
BBC	Positive
Drowned in Sound	7/10
Entertainment Weekly	A–
FILTER	88%
The Guardian
Los Angeles Times
NME	8/10
Pitchfork Media	7.1/10
Rolling Stone
Mediacorp xinmsn

Banga is the eleventh studio album by American rock musician Patti Smith, released on June 1, 2012 on Columbia Records. Recorded throughout 2011 at New York's Electric Lady Studios and Hoboken's Hobo Recorders, Banga was produced by Smith, Tony Shanahan, Jay Dee Daugherty and collaborator Lenny Kaye. The album includes a number of guest musicians including Tom Verlaine of Television, Italian band Casa del Vento, Jack Petruzzelli and Smith's own children, Jackson and Jesse Paris.

Inspired by Smith's "unique dreams and observations", the material on Banga focuses on "a wide range of human experience" and features songs about history, current affairs, death and nature. The album was announced alongside the release of its lead single, "April Fool", as a digital download on April 1, 2012.

Banga was recorded throughout 2011 at Electric Lady Studios in New York. Speaking of the recording process, Smith said: "there's a certain innocence recording your first things that you can't recapture but we recorded this album in the same studio -- in Jimi Hendrix' studio Electric Lady -- with the same personnel, the same sense of idealism and even, by coincidence, the record is coming out on the anniversary of when we recorded my debut album Horses in 1974. These type of things, I always take them as good signs." The sessions were produced by Smith, Tony Shanahan, Jay Dee Daugherty and Lenny Kaye.

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Wikipedia