Right on Track: Introducing TRAAMS

Bands that come from sleepy towns, especially bands as noisy as TRAAMS, are often painted as frustrated, cooped-up, fighting against limited music scenes or conservative noise policies. Not TRAAMS. Or, they shouldn’t be. Although Chichester – a quiet, pretty cathedral city in the south of England – is far from a hotbed of up-and-coming music makers, Stu Hopkins, Leigh Padley and Adam Stock feel very much at home.

Writing an introductory piece on the band feels awkwardly overdue; the three-piece recently released their second album, Modern Dancing and, as with their debut and the EPs before it, it’s a thrill-a-minute, slacker-indie delight. Tight when it matters but unafraid to play loose with structure, their 2015 sophomore record was crammed with frustrated, hook-filled party songs that are really, really loud.

Before the band squeeze back into the van for their March tour (they’ll hit King Tut’s on the 11th), we caught up with guitarist and vocalist Hopkins to receive a full briefing on TRAAMS’ history of “bumping along,”  the places and faces behind their newest record, and how, actually, they’re not at all keen on escaping their hometown.

“People keep writing that we’re trying to escape Chichester, and that we hate it. But we really like it here! More so since we started the band, even, because we travel loads… you do get to see quite a lot of the world. And… it really makes you appreciate what you’ve got when you get back. Somewhere really quiet, where all my friends are, it’s nice.”

"This record was about capturing the noise! It’s hard, without just turning the record up..." – Stu Hopkins

A potted history of TRAAMS follows; the three met via a club night that Hopkins started, “because as much as we like it here, it is all pretty boring. I used to put on a club night because there was nothing to do. There’s still nothing to do but there was even less then.” Padley and Stock were then in “this really cool post-punk band” called Dascha, and Hopkins booked them to play his night. “It was one of those places were, very quickly, everybody knew everybody – so I got to know them, but we weren’t really, like, good mates.”

After a few years of colliding in the mud at music festivals, Hopkins met Stock “properly” at a friend’s birthday party. “We just got really drunk and started listening to some really good records, getting all excited like, ‘We should do some stuff… We should really do some stuff.’ But then we left, and I didn’t think anything of it. It was like meeting a girl, and not expecting her to call… and then he called me!”

Padley had been living in Leeds “…or was it Huddersfield?” Hopkins half remembers. “But he kept getting robbed… so he came back [to Chichester] and he phoned Adam. Then we all met up, and a month later we had a record deal.” 

Aside from picturesque cobbles and myriad options for a nice coffee, the good thing about Chichester is that it’s far from poorly connected. With Brighton barely an hour away, TRAAMS cut their teeth gigging around the city by the sea’s buoyant selection of DIY venues. It was one such night – playing the Green Door Store for a friend of a friend’s birthday party – that set up their ridiculously speedy transition from brand-new band to signing with beloved Brighton label FatCat (also home to Honeyblood, C Duncan and The Twilight Sad). One birthday party led to another; “Somebody there asked, ‘Can you come play my mate’s birthday too?’ We were like, another birthday? It was a surprise thing, and the guy whose birthday it was, he worked for FatCat! So all of FatCat were there. We met Sam, one of the A&Rs, and she asked us if we’d done any recording… we said yeah, loads.”

“Loads” of recordings turned out to be almost enough for a whole album. So, on FatCat’s request, TRAAMS quickly took down the free demos they’d posted to Bandcamp and set to making their debut record, Grin. “It was all done in a weird order, lots of back and forth and roundabouts,” Hopkins laughs.

Working with two brilliant producers, Rory Attwell and MJ, the band recorded Grin over multiple sessions – ending up with such an abundance of tracks that they released an EP called Ladders, too. For greater context, Attwell was a founding member of noughties band Test Icicles, and has since been responsible for producing the likes of Palma Violets, Male Bonding and Mazes. MJ runs “DIY-minded” Suburban Home Studios in Leeds. He’s a member of weirdo pysch-rock band Hookworms, and his production credits include Joanna Gruesome, Trust Fund and The Spook School, as well as tons of your other favourites.

TRAAMS were eager to make the most of their producers’ infinite wisdom. “We’ve been really lucky, it’s such a nice DIY scene in the UK,” Hopkins enthuses. “Basically, all of these DIY bands in London were working with Rory, and all of the bands up north were working with MJ. And, well, as soon as we knew Rory, by association you start meeting other people. Then we went to Leeds and met Matt, and obviously you meet Menace Beach, you meet Hookworms, you meet Eagulls. Everyone knows everyone, from bumming it around the UK.”

Whilst Grin reflected their nomadic approach to recording sessions – “We just mashed it all up together, we had loads of stuff but it wasn’t very well thought out” – when it came to recording their second album, Modern Dancing, the band’s attack was much more considered. Choosing to return to MJ’s studio for a solid two weeks of recording, Hopkins says that “we just knew the flow of the record: what tracks we wanted on it, and how they’d work together, the different movements throughout.

“We’d been gigging the songs for a while, and we wanted to see if [MJ] wanted to kick them into shape a bit. Let him produce a bit more, re-learn some bits… It was more of a project.” Once the two weeks were up, FatCat offered the band an extra seven days in the studio – “just to see if there was anything else in the pot… and we very quickly wrote three or four more songs. They weren’t meant to be on the album, but then Modern Dancing turned into being the album title… and probably my favourite track, too.”

TRAAMS quickly realised that their strategy, second time around, was in trying to sound louder – using sprawling, piercing feedback to dictate the pace and tone of the record. “This record was about capturing the noise. It’s hard, without just turning the record up… it’s hard to capture that real live dynamic. So if you start playing around with it sonically… The idea with the feedback was really intentional. And really fun, as well. Matt would have me with all these crazy distortion peddles, moving around the room to make my guitar squeal, making me pull my strings. It was about getting those textures there.

The result is a record that feels like a postcard from the sweaty front row of a live show. Built on fun-filled, iron-clad tension, the band distort any typical verse/chorus structure – throwing it all out there, only to pull back when you expect it the least. From recent single Neckbrace to extroverted thrasher Gimme Gimme Gimme (Love), or the slam-dunk aggression of Succulent Thunder Anthem, TRAAMS have honed the art of a precisely placed breakdown. There’s a pause in Gimme… that exists purely to tease; “Leigh wanted it shorter, but we were like, ‘No, no, no, no. It needs to be much longer. Way longer!’  We do it live, keep it going waaay too long. People are like, is this ever going to end?”

But as much as TRAAMS enjoy pissing about on stage, they have a selective approach to touring. Hopkins describes their current, ultra-cosy van situation with a mixed tone of anticipation and dread: “The band supporting us are our friends, called Seize the Chair. They’re very enterprising and own their own tour bus company… well, like, two vans. They’ve offered to split with us, so there’ll be nine of us in a nine-seater… We’re going to go mad. Flu, dysentery…”

When The Skinny points out that the tour only lasts a couple of weeks, Hopkins bursts out laughing: “Yeah! Can you tell that we don’t actually tour very often? We’re not the heartiest of tourers. Gradually, we’ve sort of… not reined it in, but we only do stuff that we really, really want to do.” So, take assurance that when TRAAMS set their sat-nav to Manchester and Glasgow, it’s because they’re dead set on bringing the house down. Leaving behind their current rehearsal space in an old pig-pen in rural Sussex – isolated so that the band "can turn everything up" – TRAAMS are proud of their ability to challenge your eardrums. "We are pretty noisy," Hopkins says, excitedly. "Have you seen us play?"