It’s a golden era of music for people that are three degrees off normal, those who look at genre labels and laugh, and are here for the vibes alone. If you’ve ever wondered what it would sound like if Trent Reznor took LSD and tried to write the soundtrack to The Shining or if prime-era Smashing Pumpkins got a synthesizer and tried to write a Sunn O)) record, boy do I have a recommendation for you.
Austin’s Troller take a Costco-sized portion of influences and find a way to make the most eerie pop music you’ve ever heard. Their third overall and first for Relapse, Drain, out May 26, is a Lynchian fever dream of dungeon pop, fusing witch house, industrial shoegaze, gothic pop, and a clear love of classic horror soundtrack design. I may be underselling how magnetic and out of time Drain is—While yes, there is a lot going on as the band pull from various musical fibers, Troller make music to be enjoyed. Let the band enrapture you, and seek comfort in the sensual confusion.
The trio feature husband and wife Amber and Justin Star-Goers as bassist/vocalist and guitarist/engineer respectively, as well as SURVIVE member Adam Jones on the synth and man of rhythm. The trio came together before Amber and Justin were even dating, starting about 15 years ago, though this is their first record all written, recorded, and mastered in-house. Speaking to all three members one unseasonably warm March evening, we bonded over a shared love of soundtracks, synths, and music that is about the vibes first. I had to ask Justin what gives with the long wait between this record and 2016’s excellent Graphic:
“I think our first year of the pandemic, we just didn’t do anything. It was kind of weird, maybe for various reasons. Was it safe to meet up? Did we feel inspired? And then you get to a point where I think whether or not you’re inspired doesn’t fucking matter. You just have to finish it. For me, the inspiration comes from the process a lot of times. So even if I’m feeling like I don’t have any creativity, as soon as Adam and Amber are in the room, it just starts flowing again. So I think the time we spent not doing it was a little weird, but getting back into it helped immediately flow in again.”
What’s most noticeable in the sonic shift from Graphic is just how damn catchy these songs are, at least relative to Troller’s baseline. Some of that is due to Amber’s excellent and haunting crooning, and it was all intentional:
“(This is us) trying to write poppy music,” Jones shares, “but it actually doesn’t feel like that poppy overall. It sometimes feels like we’ve made a whole album of deep cuts instead of the whole album of bangers. I’m OK with that because that’s all my favorite bands when it comes down to it (laughs).”
Regarding some of the inspiration, stoner metal comes up, less so in sound but in style and a mutual love of Sunn O))). Jones elaborates on some of the expected and not-so musical compasses for the record:
“We really do like a lot of those kind of ’90’s bands that did have a good sense of atmosphere with heaviness (like Nine Inch Nails). Another one would be Type O Negative. We really like their production style and their songwriting and everything. And we wanted to bring… I mean, we’re also really big early Smashing Pumpkins fans. Being able to bring a little bit of heaviness with a little bit of sweetness is always what we wanted to do, but not ignore everything that’s happened since the ’90s, I guess.”
“A lot of times when I might get stuck or hung up on something,” Justin adds, “Adam would always bring up, “But what would they do on Siamese Dream?” I think Siamese Dream is weirdly a big influence on this album, even if it doesn’t sound like it at all in the end. It’s just kind of a reference point for what we’d be inspired by at times.”
Part of it is their vibrant and unique visual art (both in terms of sensual album art and seductive and eerie music videos that feel like walking down the halls of the Overlook Hotel), a love of cinema has shaped Troller from before they got together. Like the best cinema-conscious art, there’s even a magical beast that helps result in that special sauce that is the band’s full sound, as Adam chuckles:
“Then, even after we have the songs mostly done, there’s this whole process that we go through that we sometimes jokingly call the ‘withering troll’ of the band where we re-amp the bass guitar and the snares at least and sometimes lots of other stuff through extra effects afterwards, outboard effects.”
“Everything sounds fun,” Justin adds. “It’s like nothing goes untouched. Sometimes, I think that’s where some of the density can come from, and it is just filling all those little spaces. So that I think is a big part of the Troller sound now. And maybe it’s not even that obvious when you listen to the album, but it definitely changes everything.”
Leave it to the vocalist to come up with the perfect summation for why Drain has kept its hooks in me since I first got it:
“We’re not trying to be anything we’re not,” Amber says. “It’s just a direct reflection of all of the different influences that we have as musicians, and we come at our songwriting from a very experimental, outsider perspective. It just so happens that we mesh a whole lot of different sounds and stuff. At the end of the day, we’re all just obsessed with sounds and tones, and we gravitate towards heavier, dronier things because they sound cool, and they feel good. There’s a lot of parallels, in my opinion, and experience of really heavy, loud journey music to ambient new age music. There’s a vibe there that’s similar that we’re trying to continually teeter back and forth on feeling safe and feeling terrified. I mean, that’s life, right?”
Photo courtesy of Troller
