Freistadt Gdańsk’s Trupa Trupa are back after their last LP Of The Sun, with a four track EP which is as good a way as any to fall headlong into their world. It’s possibly (possibly) the most hypnotising release to date, packing in a welter of feelings and impressions in four short, “simple” tracks.
Post-hardcore, shoegaze, postpunk, indiepop: Trupa Trupa brengt al deze stijlen onder in een krachtig en schitterend eigen geluid. Het meest recente album van de experimentele indierockband uit Gdańsk werd lovend ontvangen door The Quietus en Pitchfork, maar ook voor eerdere studioalbums kon Trupa Trupa rekenen op prachtige recensies en werden zelfs vergelijkingen met bands als Mercury Rev, My Bloody Valentine, Syd Barrett en Can gemaakt. Of, zoals The Quietus schrijft: “Trupa Trupa’s Of The Sun takes apparently simple songs and brutally smashes them up”.
Nakładem amerykańskiej wytwórni Whited Sepulchre Records ukazała się split kaseta z gwiazdami teksańskiej alternatywy Suspirians.
We may never know the source of the cosmic winds that blew these two bands in the same orbit, but to have the Gdansk, Poland based TRUPA TRUPA and the Austin, TX based Suspirians sharing the same cassette is really, really magickal.
Roaring out of the gate in 2015 with their album Headache on X-Ray Records, critics fawned over TRUPA TRUPA’s no-frills Kraut rock and aggressive sense of motorik timing. Their subsequent albums landed them on best-of from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and The Wire. “I’ll find” started as a track meant for their new album “Of the Sun” but ended up as a 22 minute stand alone piece, after some judicious editing, we present “I’ll find” in its leanest and most potent form.
You can make a real link between black midi’s fierce invention and many of the Polish acts on the bill at OFF Festival – take Trupa Trupa, whose hypnotic post-punk uses CAN basslines as starting points to deliver a psychedelia far more interesting than many of their motorikby-number British counterparts. There’s a shamanistic but unfussy quality to frontman Kwiatkowski – how soon can we have them over in Britain? The closest thing to a Turkish Pet Shop Boys (and this is perhaps the highest compliment one could give), Trupa Trupa draw a huge audience for their gutteral synth-pop – you don’t have to understand their wry, well-observed lyrics to enjoy gorgeous offerings like Koca Bir Sacmalik neither.
Fergal Kinney, Louder Than War magazine
Trupa Trupa’s monochrome post-punk is committed yet functional.
Reportaż o Trupie Trupa w BBC World Service (The World Tonight).
Now, most of us are nostalgic about the pop music of our youth. It was better then. But essentially, love, the lack of it, the pursuit of it, and the obsession with it – that’s the stuff of most pop music. And probably always has been. Occasionally though, superstar-singers and bands address major political themes, or profound aspects of human lives. And that’s the case of the Polish band – Trupa Trupa, currently on tour in the UK.
„The band that won’t forget: Gdańsk group mixes poetry with psychedelia – and messages about the Holocaust.
A Gdańsk-based indie band has made waves in international waters with music taking on political populism and Holocaust denial.
Trupa, Trupa, a four-piece group from the coastal city, won international attention when their first album ‘Headache’ was released by a British label in 2015, and since then they have picked up rave reviews from esteemed publications such as Rolling Stone, The Chicago Tribune and The Times.
It’s been a joy covering Trupa Trupa over the past couple of years, and I was absolutely delighted to see the band from Gdańsk, Poland, popping up here on Whited Sepulchre’s split series. Their brand of psychedelic post-punk with intensely political undertones (frontdude Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a fascinating poet and researcher, digging into some World War II–related topics on CBC radio documentary “The Invisible Shoes of Stutthof Concentration Camp”) is easy to return to again and again, and their new record “Of the Sun” on Lovitt is a stunner. Here we get “I’ll find,” a sixteen-minute castoff from that record that the band admitted they just couldn’t stop playing. So it sees the light of day here on the A-side, a rumbling kraut jam with ethereal vocals and mesmerizing repetition that expands and contracts the longer it goes, like lungs taking in and expelling breath. It’s paired with “Voice of Rain” by Austin psych-rockers Suspirians, and it’s an inspired match. While Suspirians don’t have as even a keel – or an even keel at all – the trio kick out almost seventeen minutes of dense jammage, just as Texans are bound to do if you give them guitars and drums and such and plug them in. Plus, Suspirians are witches, I think! Which makes their side even cooler. I’m riding that pagan vibe all the way to my own oblivion, riding that nuke till it blows up somewhere way out in the desert.