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.
Singer and guitarist Grzegorz Kwiatkowski knows something about facing horrors with clarity. His wife’s family are descendants of Holocaust survivors, and his grandfather was a prisoner at the Stutthof concentration camp. Kwiatkowski is an outspoken antifascist, and he’s devoted his life to creating music, writing poetry, and expanding scholarship that addresses Poland’s authoritarian past and present. In 2019, he made headlines because, in 2015, while walking in a forest outside Gdańsk, he and a friend had discovered a graveyard of thousands of shoes taken from some of the 110,000 people who passed through the Stutthof camp, of whom 65,000 were murdered. But in 2018, Poland passed a law making it more or less illegal to suggest that the Polish government or its citizens had been complicit in the Holocaust. When Kwiatkowski spoke out about the shoes that remained in the woods, he suggested that they were being left to disintegrate along with the truth of Poland’s role in Nazism.
Trupa Trupa’s music has varied over time. Over six records and a smattering of singles and EPs, they’ve drawn influence from everything from the warm psychedelic pop of the Beatles to the icy atmospheric postpunk of Killing Joke. All the while, they’ve been unafraid to confront issues as grave as genocide head-on: “We don’t exist at all / We won’t exist no more,” they sing in the refrain of 2013’s “Exist.” Though the song begins in a languid, melancholy, and matter-of-fact tone, it ends with whimsical humming, breezy guitars, and hip-swinging rhythms that capture a sense of running full force toward a future worth fighting for. If the news has you feeling fragile and despondent, Trupa Trupa understand. This is a show for comrades.
Micco Caporale, www.chicagoreader.com
