2023 has been a banner year for North Carolina bands. Though the calendar nears its end, the last six months have seen the continued success of Indigo De Souza and the coronation of Wednesday. It’s also seen the emergence of Fust and Sluice, whose albums Genevieve and Radial Gate, respectively, have been under-the-radar favorites. Each of these bands, no matter how different they may be at first glance, carry within their music a distinct, enveloping warmth, often brought about by washes of pedal steel or slide guitar. Then there’s Truth Club.
The Raleigh band stands out amidst this broader scene, making a kind of claustrophobic rock that’s more closely aligned with bands like Ovlov, Grass is Green or Pile. The latter is especially top of mind when listening to Truth Club, as frontman Travis Harrington’s rich vocals are immediately reminiscent of Rick Macguire’s distinctive howl. Their 2019 debut, Not an Exit, helped establish the band’s sound and style, flitting between passages either dense or skeletal, switching at a moment’s notice.
Running From the Chase, their sophomore album and first for Double Double Whammy, is one of the most alluring and uncomfortable records of the year. Placing heavier emphasis on melody and dynamic arrangement, Harrington and his bandmates, Kameron Vann, Yvonne Chazal and Elise Jaffe, have built an album that feels like a nihilistic Trojan Horse. These songs create an impending sense of doom while also getting stuck in your head.
Lead single “Blue Eternal” sees them pushing further into the murky dread at the heart of their sound. As though taking on the POV of a poor soul caught in a whirlpool, Harrington sings “held in a wave of some vibration / a trace of our trial / stuck in its cycle”—the tense, driving guitars a riptide of their own. That trapped feeling extends into songs like “Exit Cycle,” where calming guitar strums undergird the description of a wasted day framed as “two dozen hours, deposed.” It’s a song about the feeling of futility, lack of fulfillment, and hopelessness, and yet it’s palpably ambitious. Truth Club has mastered the art of the slow build, and when “Exit Cycle” reaches its peak, it’s transcendent. Indigo De Souza makes a cameo here as well, singing a sweet, hazy backup that stands in contrast with Harrington’s commanding chant.
While individually the songs on Running From the Chase are written with enough precision to stand on their own, the cohesion in their production can anonymize them to their detriment when played in full, like looking at an overcast sky only to learn its one supermassive, enveloping gray cloud. Such is the detriment of a band playing with a conventional sound and trying to make it their own. Despite this, the hooks in each song stand out and stay with you—phrases that break off and roll around together in your mind.
The songs melding together isn’t always to the album’s detriment, though. The run from “Dancing Around My Tongue” to the title track “Running From the Chase” deepen the depressive beauty of the album’s latter half. With guitar tones edging into shoegaze territory, this pair of songs separated by the brief instrumental passage “the chase,” ranks among the band’s finest moments. The former lives in an anxious state, Harrington singing about wanting to get the words he says as right as he can. Musically, it’s just as uncertain. Moving between phases of tense guitar riffs and deceptively serene passages, it moves like quicksilver. The title track sees Harrington’s delivery growing more rhythmic amidst jagged riffs. The combination is hypnotic, as though the band wants you to nod along.
On one level, there is a silver lining to all of Truth Club’s toiling music. Harrington wrote these songs during a particularly aggressive battle with bipolar disorder, and tried to capture his feelings within them. He describes it as though he’s placed these feelings “in a jar” to observe down the line. That they exist means he’s been able to sublimate them down into something new, something useful to himself and to us. The perspectives we hear from, singing from beneath a crushing weight, are doing so from the past. Running From the Chase is a reminder to let some light fill up darker corners.
Eric Bennett is a music critic in Philadelphia with bylines at Pitchfork, Post-Trash and The Alternative. They are also a co-host of Endless Scroll, a weekly podcast covering the intersection of music and internet culture. You can follow them on Twitter @violet_by_hole.
