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New Music Friday / NPR

“This is just a gloriously noisy gritty rock band from Poland, Bob Boilen and I love very dearly. They have a new record out today called B FLAT A.”

Robin Hilton, New Music Friday cycle, www.npr.org

Žetev

The Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts had just published my book “Žetev”. The afterward was written by the book’s translator, Simona Klemenčič, and by Oto Luthar.

B FLAT A review – MOJO

Gdansk rockers add fresh pre-punk ingredients to their Baltic bouillabaisse. The first three tracks of this sinewy sixth album revisit the taut post-hardcore that earned Grzegorz Kwiatkowski’s muscular quartet the reductive but appealing soubriquet ‘the Polish Fugazi’. The next five take them into new territory. Lines brings a clear (and all the more welcome for its unexpectedness) echo of mid-period Pink Floyd to the table. Uniforms’ sinister singalong chorus, “I wanna be all my uniforms” also showcases serious stadium-rock potential, while All And All could be one of those tantalising McCartney new song fragments in Get Back. When that woozy melodic miasma kicks into the ferocious moshpit churn of Uselessness – imagine Fire Dances-era Killing Joke asked to write a song about Covid-19 in an unspecified second language – it feels like Trupa Trupa have cracked it.

Ben Thompson, MOJO

B FLAT A review – The Times

From the underground music scene of Gdansk, Poland, come this excellent four-piece whose unlikely combination of driving rhythms, sweet atmospheric moments and surreal sense of humour add up to a post-punk Pink Floyd, with awkwardness and dreaminess in equal measure. All and All sounds like the kind of cosmic glide that could have come off The Dark Side of the Moon, but Uselessness rumbles with menace. Very much an authentically Polish take on rock history, this is a fascinating and unique record, driven by a real sense of urgency.

Will Hodgkinson, The Times

A four star London gig review in The Times and The Sunday Times

Coming to the capital after the worst storm in 30 years, Trupa Trupa appeared to take the challenges of being on tour in the midst of such meteorological mayhem in their stride. “So good to be in London after two years of hell,” said Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, the singer of the band, from Gdansk in Poland, which took elements of progressive rock, punk and the avant-garde and infused them with a sense of humour.