For Polish band Trupa Trupa, remembering our history is paramount. You may have noticed the term “unprecedented times” has become a very common way to describe life over the last few years. In some ways, that’s true, but just because these exact circumstances may feel new 0r shocking, often there is precedence.
For over a decade, the Polish band Trupa Trupa has been unleashing idiosyncratic blasts of psychedelic rock with a sharp post-punk edge, using music as a form of catharsis as well as activism. The group — Grzegorz Kwiatkowski and Wojtek Juchniewicz on vocals and guitar, plus Tomek Pawluczuk on drums — is now gearing up for the release of their new EP, “Mourners,” along with a performance at New York’s Heaven can wait on March 1.
Poland’s Trupa Trupa confront humankind’s atrocities to fight for something better. Trupa Trupa make rickety, bleak music for surviving authoritarianism. Since self-releasing their full-length debut, 2011’s LP, the trio from the coast of northern Poland have wandered through the foggiest and most aching parts of psych and garage rock, postpunk, and posthardcore to create a sound whose greatest consistency is its ability to express the darkest aspects of the human experience—and the beauty we must nurture despite it all.
In 2018, Trupa Trupa was 15 minutes from taking the stage at the venerable South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, when singer and guitarist Grzegorz Kwiatkowski’s amp burned out.
The song Mourners by Trupa Trupa has been included on Rolling Stone’s list of the best songs of 2025!
The album Mourners by Trupa Trupa made it to the podium in music critic Greg Kot’s and the Sound Opinions show’s ranking of the best albums of the year.
This special “ttt” cassette will be released Feb 21.
B FLAT A end of the year list made by Zach Schonfeld.
Trupa Trupa hail from Poland, where for over a decade they’ve been using serrated post-punk to draw connections between their country’s fascist past and the present day. According to singer Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, their new B FLAT A is about “the wasteland of human nature where hatred and genocide are not just distant reverberations of Central European history but still resonate in contemporary reality.” Out today, it’s a tense and explosive listen brimming with heady ideas, occasionally branching off in surprising directions like the psych-pop-tinged single “Uniforms.” Perhaps appropriately, the album’s baseline sound calls back to the Cold War era, the bridge between that old uncomfortable history and now.
I first met poet and musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski via email when we began corresponding about his band, the Polish political psych-rock four-piece Trupa Trupa. Over the course of our exchange, we began talking about poetry. At the time, Kwiatkowski was working with Rain Taxi and the translator Peter Constantine on a chapbook called Crops. He sent it to me, and I was stunned; the poems were short, ruthless fragments about the horrors of the 20th century, sourced from historical documents but reading as contemporary as ever. This is the crux of Kwiatkowski’s music and writing: to make art against the bleakness of humanity. I was thrilled when he agreed to have a conversation over email about his work as a multi-genre artist.