Sub Pop has signed Trupa Trupa from Gdańsk, 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.”

Trupa Trupa will tour the world in 2019, beginning with appearances at SXSW in Austin, Texas (March 14th-16th), and Slovakia and Poland (April 25th-27th). Additional shows will be announced soon.

Mar. 14 - Austin, TX - SXSW / Hotel Vegas / LEVITATION SXSW presented by CREEM Magazine (12:20 am)
Mar. 15 - Austin, TX - SXSW / Austin Convention Center / Flatstock Stage (3:30 pm)
Mar. 16 - Austin, TX - SXSW / Venue TBC
Apr. 25 -  Gdańsk, PL - Ziemia
Apr. 26 - Poznań, PL - Spring Break Festival
Apr. 27 - Bratislava, SK - Sharpe Festival

MICHAL SZLAGA

About Trupa Trupa:

The music that Polish quartet Trupa Trupa creates lands like anthems, with barbed hooks driven deep by an italicized 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 humor, and survivalist self-assurances, all subtly nestled into these refrains and reflected back by secretly complex textures.

The setting of Gdańsk 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 funneled 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.