Discipline

Auckland’s Trust Punks strive for a place in the world on their debut album, writes ANTHONY CAREW.

Trust Punks’ sardonic name echoes a prevailing cultural sentiment especially beloved by guardians of music nostalgia: that rock ’n’ roll no longer possesses the capacity for genuine sedition, punk’s epoch now replayed only as farce, a rite of passage – and privilege – for the children of the ruling class. Yet, by wearing a term of slander with a smirk, Trust Punks aren’t offering some ironic embrace of the contemporary malaise, but instead seek to engage with the very idea of the rock band as it stands: as the leisure-time hobby of wealthy Westerners; as a vehicle for art; and, indeed, as a possible agent for social change.

The fact that these earnest young men believe that guitars and drums can still be as revolutionary as the sickle and hammer is a rebellion not in the old rockist sense, but in defiance of it; two fingers up to every aging punk telling kids-these-days not to bother.

The earnest young men of Trust Punks hail from Auckland; Discipline is their debut album. In an artfully worded one-sheet manifesto, they speak of the record as marking “the process of becoming a self-aware human being,” acknowledging power relations, privileges and attendant guilt with a remarkable candour. Their dreams for the album, they write, will be that it “hopefully inspires us to think critically about how the world works and maybe try to change what is wrong with it and ourselves.” The earnestness and hopefulness in such a sentence shows Trust Punks in all the glories of their youthful thoughtfulness: a mixture of painful naïveté, self-consciousness and dare-to-dream ambition.

The sentiments of Trust Punks’ manifesto echo throughout Discipline, a record on which the band, beginning on opener ‘Doubt’, “reach for a future that’s not quite there.” ‘Prone Hold’ takes being born-into-privilege literally: “First things felt were the strongest grip/Cold artificial light and my cord was snipped,” Alexander Grant sings, in his off-kilter warble. These songs are the sound of young men striving for a place in the world, and a better understanding of it. Where an older head might think twice, for example, about daring to address late-period capitalism in song, ‘Gordian Knot’ leaps headlong into the fray, its opening verse – “When the root is wholly growth/will the rot begin to show?/Dormant in a constant pursuit/presented as an unbending truth” – reminiscent of Laetitia Sadier’s unorthodox political-as-lyrical tracts.

Stylistically, Trust Punks are ‘indie rock’ with no particular stylistic root; owing a debt to bands from Swell Maps to Sonic Youth to Women, without being beholden to any of them; to any era, sound or scene. With three guitarists, the tunes are dense with guitars and intricate with interplay, the thoughtfully assembled parts speaking of the conceptual whole.

The album moves fast – it goes by in 24 minutes – but feels big, and it builds towards an epic closer, ‘Enemies’, in which the ghosts of old regrets haunt a stumbling, six-minute, Iceage-y slab of Gothic cowpunk. In it, Grant and Joseph Thomas scream, toxic with guilt at those they’ve wronged, from girls they’ve fucked over to pals they’ve pissed off (the pair seeing the spectral vision of “the crestfallen faces of a dozen alienated former friends”). Culminating with its most personal mea culpa, Discipline stays true to its attempt at atonement. Trust Punks’ debut is out to make amends, not in 12 steps but in seven songs.

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‘Discipline’ is out now on CD, vinyl and digital through Spunk. Australian tour dates below.

Thurs, Nov 27 – Grace Darling Basement, Melbourne, VIC [w/Gold Class + Possible Humans]
Fri, Nov 28 – Music Farmers, Wollongong, NSW [free, early show]
Fri, Nov 28 – The Landsdowne Hotel, Sydney, NSW [w/The Ocean Party, Day Ravies + Melon Melon]