Trupa Trupa Dance Away the Darkness With New EP
Polish art-rock band Trupa Trupa have announced their latest release: a five-song EP called Mourners, due out Feb. 21, 2025 on Glitterbeat Records. Along with this news, they’ve released a single, “Sister Ray,” whose slinky, disco-leaning groove is unlike anything you’d expect from this dark and stormy band.
Trupa Trupa are fronted by the artist, poet, and activist Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, who has dedicated his life to fighting fascism and hate through art. For obvious and regrettable reasons, this is a theme that feels more urgent than ever in the U.S. right now. On their last full-length album, 2022’s B Flat A, they kicked up a terrifically ominous noise with occasional flashes of light. Since then, they’ve reformed as a trio and teamed up with noted post-punk producer Nick Launay, known for his work with everyone from Killing Joke and the Birthday Party to Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Idles.
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The result, as heard on “Sister Ray,” is a cleaner, crisper Trupa Trupa that loses none of the band’s edge. While “Sister Ray” is not a Velvet Underground cover, it does share a certain air of anarchic possibility with Lou Reed’s 1968 proto-noise jam. Kwiatkowski and bandmate Wojtek Juchniewicz sing about “a line of idols to the horizon” and repeat the title phrase again and again. It’s bracingly surreal, to be sure, but what does it mean?
Kwiatkowski, whose voluminous emails to members of the press feel like part of his overall art practice, sent me a note the morning after Trump’s election that suggests a clue. He offered a message of solidarity and support: “Here in Poland, we endured eight years of a far-right president and government, and we survived. Our democracy is now stronger than ever. I am sure a happy ending will come to the U.S. too, though it will take time.”
Trupa Trupa, he continued in another email, “is an art rock band that creates dark music to fight darkness.” He pondered “how amazing it is that a person creates art in such a subconscious way like in a trance… and suddenly this art ends up reflecting the dark political reality of here and now.” So maybe that’s the answer: Turn up “Sister Ray” today and think about how art can help us hold on to something true even in the most troubled times.
Through 2025, Kwiatkowski will be an artist-in-residence at Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive. He’s also continuing his years-long fight to preserve the history of the Holocaust in his home country by turning the site of the Stutthof concentration camp into a memorial.
“It’s incredible how we are descending further into this darkness, and how history has returned to us in such a devastating way,” he wrote in yet another email. “Now it’s not just Eastern Europe that is at risk, but the entire USA is threatened from A to Z…. That said, we have art. Through art we will spread love. We don’t give up.”
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