Review: Truck Violence - Violence

This article was written for cybergrind.me and was originally published on July 13th, 2024.

Deep in the Canadian heartland, Truck Violence reinterprets Americana in suffocating fashion.

As I write this, the East Coast is gripped in a heat wave worse than I can ever remember. Even today, a huge downturn from previous days basking meekly in the 70s, my room is slow-roasting me; in a few days, it will break 100 degrees. My car is nearly unbearable to drive in this heat; I’ve tried to lean into it by listening to music that sounds equally sweltering. Truck Violence’s sophomore album. Violence , finds itself at a strange crossroads, built off the instrumentation and lyrical tropes of American folk music but with its rural flair transported out of the American heartland and into the cooler forests and rocky plains of Quebec. The Montreal-based quartet cites Oklahoma noise rockers Chat Pile as a major influence on their direction, something which accounts for the uncharacteristically warm sound that drew me to use it as a soundtrack to my slow death via mobile UV-powered oven, but while both bands reckon with the innate emotional emptiness that accompanies the physical emptiness of places far removed from other places, Violence rejects Chat Pile’s electric hum and cacophonous death rattle and instead sources its existentialism naturally from run-down churches and houses that have never known more than one set of occupants.

Violence marks a stark shift for Truck Violence, who originally emerged as a queer hip hop trio under the name No Cru5t before changing their name to Truck with the release of their (incredible) 2023 debut album, Hinterlands , an enigmatic and highly developed record that found its niche in jazzy, off-kilter sample-driven grooves. Soon after its release, longtime producer and drummer Noah Baxter (who stayed on as mixing and mastering engineer for Violence ) departed the group and it underwent a dramatic shift, taking on bassist Chris Clegg and drummer Ryley Klima and finding a new concept in “Americana hardcore.” Violence is the fruit of these efforts, and has the tall task of not only re-establishing the band with a completely new sound and concept but putting together sounds in a way that is, to my knowledge, singularly unique.

Across its 30 minute runtime, Violence swerves dramatically from crushing walls of dissonant guitar to extended folk passages. While its approach to finding a Canadian identity within the artistic realm of Americana is most obvious in its quieter moments, where the banjo can truly shine through, there is a consistent undercurrent of rootsy vocab that shines through guitarist Paul Lecours’s tonality, sometimes bringing to mind a less dramatic, more hardcore-rooted version of black metal/roots music fusion artist Ryan Clackner’s twangy country stylings. For the most part, though, Violence ’s language of choice is a pidgin of Slint’s slow-paced apocalypses and modern day metallic noise rock, never quite tipping into conventional metal riffing but always crushingly heavy. Opener “Undressed you layn’t before” presents a perhaps misleadingly uptempo portrait of the band’s sound that catches the listener off guard with a blasting,dissonant attack, but the true zenith of heaviness is “The gash,” which crawls through a series of rapturous breakdowns counterbalanced only by the meek shelter of depressive banjo segments and regularly interrupted by sharp spikes of feedback. Fans of screamo who find other post-hardcore sounds to be lacking in intensity will appreciate the sheer weight of Violence , a record that manages to feel suffocating even in its most acoustic moments.

“The gash” marks something of a turning point for the pacing of the album, which felt languid even before but somehow manages to get even slower. “He ended the bender hanging” is both the album’s peak of minimalism, turning only a small handful of riffs and sections into a full four-and-a-half minute song, and one of its most enchanting cuts, building into a rare melodic climax and featuring my favorite of the album’s riffs in its final clean breakdown. Elsewhere, the album plays with aspects of the band’s hip hop background; “Undressed” features the most obviously rap-rooted vocal delivery, while “Drunk to death” slumps towards an almost nu metal groove.

But while the instrumental side of the composition equation finds a midpoint between impenetrability and mosh-ready energy, vocalist/”singer-poet” Karsyn Henderson’s lyricism is gleefully averse to being parsed. Even as a rapper, their style leaned strongly into the “rap as poetry” end of the spectrum; Violence seems slightly more obviously meaningful than previous works, but still tends to rely on imagery rather than concrete statements. Throughlines of religious symbolism (“From the lecture to confessional/Isn’t it always too late?”) and substances as a way to fill the void (“Plug as you like/with chipped pews and pills and sexual desires”) tie together the rural atmosphere of the instrumentation; Henderson’s run-on phrasing has a “turn on a dime” quality, never quite terminating as you would expect, which similarly mirrors the continuity of the monotonous riffing. Their lyricism may not straightforwardly communicate the details of the landscape it portrays, but the resulting painting is nonetheless compelling, an impossibly detailed visual collage that turns into a masterful piece of impressionism when you zoom out.

Violence is a dense record in just about every sense of the word. Impossibly heavy, dripping in aesthetics, and lyrically operating on a level entirely beyond most hardcore, it reveals new layers with every listen. It’s rare to find an album that succeeds at doing so many different things at once - incredible mosh fuel while also being downright crushingly miserable, and an intimate folksy diary of small-scale life that also feels horrifyingly empty - but Violence manages to juggle all these different dimensions while also justifying the band’s own swift evolution. Hinterlands was one of my favorite albums of 2023; I should be the last person happy that the group behind it has moved away from that sound entirely. And while I do mourn the retirement of the most exciting new hip hop outfit of the last half decade from that sound, I’m all in on Truck Violence’s new direction; Violence does the impossible and manages to force its way into my favorite albums of the year for a second year in a row. Fans of this new wave of soul-crushing North American noise rock should not overlook this strong statement of intent.

Violence is available on streaming and Bandcamp with cassettes through Mothland. Truck Violence can also be found on Instagram , Facebook , and YouTube .