Sub Pop has signed Trupa Trupa from Gdansk, Poland for a worldwide deal, and will release new music from the group in 2019. While we await details of that release, the band have delivered an official video for ‘Dream About’ a new song that features a honeyed falsetto that totters over a menacing bassline, and the frisson between them so hypnotic it renders the title phrase as an existential mantra, a lifeline.
Director Benjamin Finger had this to say of the ‘Dream About’ visual: “The video was shot on Super 8, a format I am strongly connected to, and I think it fits the music of Trupa Trupa. There is something poetic about the music, and I think it matches the images in a good way. The ‘Dream About’ video is also about seeing the world through the eyes of the child. The video features footage shot on location in Vancouver, Paris and Buenos Aires.”
About Trupa Trupa:
The music that sophisticated Polish psych-pop quartet Trupa Trupa creates lands like anthems, with barbed hooks driven deep by an italicised rhythm section or turned into a fantasy by crisscrossing harmonies. During ‘Dream About,’ honeyed falsetto totters over a menacing bassline, the frisson between them so hypnotic it renders the title phrase as an existential mantra, a lifeline. Their music is an embarrassment of riches, a string of hits in Trupa Trupa’s idiosyncratic, self-made universe.
But just beneath the surface of Trupa Trupa’s bright and indelible songs, there is a world teeming with nihilistic considerations, slyly dark humour, and survivalist self-assurances, all subtly nestled into these refrains and reflected back by secretly complex textures.
The setting of Gdansk is a crucial philosophical and aesthetic touchstone for Trupa Trupa. A city with a convoluted history of German and Polish rule and self-sovereignty, it is itself a living testament to the turnover of human toil. It’s also the homeland of Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher whose system of metaphysical will inspired Nietzsche and, in turn, Trupa Trupa. Klaus Kinski was born nearby, too; Kwiatkowski considers his Werner Herzog-directed film, Fitzcarraldo, one of the best movies ever made. Kinski tries in vain to amass a fortune by piloting a steamship over a mountain into the rubber bonanza of the Amazon. It is a portrait of great effort and pathetic failure, of strain sublimating into nothing. Along with the notions of Beckett, hints of the Beatles, and the knotty complications of Radiohead, these emotions ripple through Trupa Trupa’s music.
Trupa Trupa is the second Polish band to sign to Sub Pop this year, following the February release of Perfect Son’s debut, Cast. As with Perfect Son, Sub Pop co-founder Jonathan Poneman, who has long taken a personal interest in the culture and history of Poland, has been following Trupa Trupa for years. In a 2013 interview with Pitchfork, he even mistook their second album, ++, for a set of demos when explaining that he was trying to decide whether or not he liked it. Apparently, he did.
But Trupa Trupa has grown inordinately in both confidence and execution during the last half-decade. Spurred on by a democratic process, where no one is the real leader and all ideas and influences are funnelled into the same rich sound, Trupa Trupa channel a multiverse of feelings into its captivating music. They stare into the dark and summon a light of their own, making all our tedium and toil feel not just tolerable but deceptively triumphant.
What people have said about Trupa Trupa:
“Trupa Trupa rolled in from Gdansk, Poland, with a guitar made out of what looked like a fuel can and a sound that fused East European post-punk in the mold of Plastic People of the Universe and Pulnoc with psychedelia. The dynamic, unpredictable songs shifted across imaginary – continents in a blink, just like this day of music. [SXSW Review] – Chicago Tribune
“One of the best rock bands doing business now is from Gdansk, Poland…The band recalls a less woozy version of Dungen, another band who know their ’60s psychedelia but don’t sound like thirsty revivalists. Kwiatkowski leans into the conversational loopiness of Syd Barrett and the band flowers behind him. Beauty and intensity get equal space here.”[Headache] – Los Angeles Times
“This sound, this song, and this band lands perfectly in the nexus of everything I love most in
music” [“To Me” /SXSW 2016 preview] – All Songs Considered
This avant-rock band from Gdansk, Poland is ready for its own major-label moment, based on the exciting union of experimental vigour and garage-rock fundamentals — like a Radiohead raised on a bi-polar diet of Nuggets and the German band Faust — on their two albums (2015’s Headache, 2016’s Jolly New Songs) and in the set I saw at SXSW last year.” [Iceland Airwaves preview] – Rolling Stone
“The band is Polish and the lyrics are in English, but the undercurrent of anxiety and dread that distinguishes Trupa Trupa’s music knows no nationality. Rarely jolly and unfailingly morbid, vocalist Grzegorz Kwiatkowski gets spooked by visions of falling, coffins, death and the lingering sting of humiliation as his band charts the links between psych-rock and post-punk with unswerving intensity.” [Jolly New Songs] – Newsweek
“A strange, brilliant record. […] This is a powerful band possessing special properties, that’s for sure. On the evidence of this record, they happily live between any time and place. Or, rather, they’ve carved out their own sort of time in their music and invited you in.” [Jolly New Songs] – The Quietus
“There’s nowhere to go but up for this most unique rock band.” [Jolly New Songs] – Relix
