Bathing in the bardo

This northern English town, for those who don’t know, was the go-to resort destination during the Victorian era. It boasted the world’s busiest train station circa 1911, the UK’s first electric public tramway (opened in 1884), and a ‘pleasure beach’ complete with all the carousels and donkey rides and glitzy hotels money could buy. Blackpool hosted millions of visitors a year throughout the first half of the 20th century. Then, in 1964, the central station closed. The rest is a familiar story: people put their money elsewhere, the local industry declined, and crime and poverty gained ground. 

These days, while I’m sure it has its perks, Blackpool has become shorthand for British degeneration and depression. “We walked towards a corner store at night past a lot of genuine rubble, like genuinely destroyed buildings,” Thomas Hart tells me. He’s the drummer of Truck Violence, a band from Canada, and was convinced the Blackpool day off was a practical joke played by the band’s manager. “There were buildings that had been one fish and chips place, and then they were another fish and chips place. You could see the history of closed-down businesses,” he says. You can visualise it: shop sign on top of shop sign like a temporary bandage. 

The four guys were down with tour-flu and got put up in a decrepit Airbnb whose one saving grace was that the bathroom played muzak whenever you turned on the light, if that’s your thing. When they checked into the place, they asked for local recommendations. “The guy who was checking us in basically said, well, you can get blackout drunk and sleep with somebody if you want. That was his advice for us as tourists.” That’s Karsyn Henderson. He fronts Truck Violence and founded the band with guitarist/banjoist Paul Lecours. They recruited Hart along with bassist Chris Clegg later on, after leaving rural Alberta. 

You wouldn’t think Blackpool and landlocked rural Alberta would have a great deal in common, but economic decline and the collapse of the middle class has its unlikely bedfellows. 

Henderson and Lecours are from a tiny, tiny town in the Athabasca oil sands region. Henderson says it’s past its prime. “The oil fields in Alberta are not as hot, so to speak, as they once were, so that made everything quite slow,” he says, the focus therefore zooming in on everything you don’t usually see or have time for. 

“That made all of the little details – the minutiae, the gossip – really important,” he elaborates. “It felt a bit like a sandbox, looking back on it, the way that people would move around, and start and break relationships. There wasn’t a whole lot to do. I think that people took for granted what there was to do, which is: when you’re in the city, people say, oh, when you go to the country, you must enjoy nature and partake in its glory, but a lot of people in rural environments don’t see that as an option. It’s there, but we’ve seen it, and so a lot of what people did wasn’t partaking in nature’s glorious bounty. It was gossiping, drinking, sleeping with people” – a trifecta their Blackpool Airbnb host was ostensibly familiar with too. 

Henderson and Lecours grew up in the kind of place where you fill your time by excavating ramshackle old farm houses and starting DIY radio stations without any training – where your friends are your everything. “He’s MVP to me,” Henderson says of Lecours, who isn’t available when we meet for this chat, though everyone else speaks fondly of him. “We grew up together, and we recorded our first album together when we were 16,” Henderson continues. “Since then he’s recorded, mixed, mastered literally every piece of music we put out – and probably will continue to do so – and just deals with all of this shit that I would never want to touch.”

They are the perfect partnership, then: Henderson the hard-to-read mastermind who pores over the work of modernist writers like Djuna Barnes and draws squirmy parallels in his lyrics between insects and semen. That makes Lecours the technically-minded confidant who knows how to get that stuff from page to playback. 

By age 17, the two had resettled on the other side of the country, in Montreal, where Henderson took a job as a window washer. The kind where you rope up really tall buildings and it’s best not to look down. He’s always wanted the band to do a live session on the swing platform part. “You might risk your job by doing it, in case anyone sees you and the camera crew,” he muses. “Maybe if music picks up enough that I can afford to make a grand exit from work, that’s something that I can try out. It would be narrative building.”

Initially, the pair formed an aggressive hip-hop/noiserap project called no cru5t, despite growing up on hardcore, emo, and folk-tradition music such as bluegrass. It seems to me like this was them bungeeing into the unknown in order to spring back to the sweet spot they were meant to find. That sweet spot is Truck Violence, which melds a heady swathe of heavy music with the aesthetically rural: banjos hopping across lumbering distortion walls like fleas on a thick wolf coat. Over the last couple years, this formula has engendered a bunch of buzz online as much as on Montreal’s live circuit (and on the unofficial live circuit the band has created by hosting outdoor all-ages shows under bridges and the like).

Mothland were first in the queue. Montreal’s legendary alternative label/family/collective is home to projects like Yoo Doo Right and La Sécurité. They put out Violence, the band’s debut, in 2024. The record was frantic but intellectual too, somewhere between the junkyard rot of early Wednesday and Drug Church at their most pissed-off and growling, but with a strong shot of something from the stoner/sludge/doom category too. 

“We were all in this little Airbnb, and kind of sad, not knowing what the hell we were supposed to be doing,” Clegg explains of how “House caught fire” came about. “We didn’t have any music gear, but we did have our acoustic instruments, so we just had a little jam, and that came really within an hour. That’s how we wanted to record it as well. We wanted to capture that feeling of just being in a room.”

It’s not just that acoustic cut: the inimitable energy of four people in a room is how you get songs like “New Jesus” as well, which is at the other end of the spectrum: grotesque, furious, and surprisingly groovy, all at once. It was the album’s first single because, the band tells me, it stands alone well – “everything builds, everything pays off.” 

“It’s really the four of us in a room trying shit out until it either works or it doesn’t,” Clegg says of the writing process. They spend a lot of time chipping away. Hart, who played in several bands before Truck Violence, says, “I’ve never thrown as much material out as what we do, but it’s because something hyper specific is trying to be captured. We try and try and try to come up with one thing that we all like, and then we go from there, and it can be an exhausting process, but we’re all very happy with what comes out of it in the end.”

The heaviest songs on the album – “Jaundiced”, “My dog would fuck the air” – came first. “Everything that broods, that gets lighter, that builds – those all came at the end,” Henderson says, “because it’s easier to elongate a narrative once you are comfortable in it. If you’ve ever tried writing any fiction or poetry, the same thing makes sense. When you start something, your first couple lines are so rushed, and you’re getting your snappiest ideas out as fast as possible, and then once you return to it, it’s like, okay, now I can elongate it and let certain things breathe. I can expand upon this idea and expand upon that idea. You really see that in the album with some of the later-produced songs. When you’re being quiet, you need a lot of poise. You need a sure foot on the ground to be quiet. You need confidence. And you build that as you write an album.” 

Take the last song: “Kindly, wash yourself”. It was the penultimate one written, and it’s easily the most melodic and liberated-feeling. When all the instruments collide in for the first chorus it feels like an exhausted sigh of relief, the major-key guitar intervals ringing out like sunrays as Henderson’s voice half-cracks over the line “wash yourself clean / and get washed clean of everything.” From there, it falls apart, regroups into a brutal, outraged battlecry verse, and then makes some time to quietly ponder. The song is uneasy and distraught, but it still forces itself to look up. It’s the kind of song that had to be written at the end of the process, and placed at the end of the process. 

“I felt as though we needed to feign some sort of consolation. It’s a hopefulness,” Henderson tells me. “Whether there is actually hope or there is not hope remains to be seen, but I felt as though it was worth assuming there was. So all of the deficiency and the confusion and the ecstasies that didn’t resolve and can’t be resolved – it’s difficult to make something of all these different experiences. Sometimes it’s nice to just wash yourself of the need to define consolation, or the need to find an ending, or the need to make meaning. Or you can take it in another way, where you just want to restart. You just want a clean slate, and so I think that’s where that was going, and it’s funny because it’s playing on this desire for some sort of end, some sort of coming to – but it itself doesn’t end, either, because the idea with washing oneself is that you just get dirty again, anyway, right? It’s just gonna happen, it just repeats, so there is no end, even in that image.”

Throughout the record, his lyrics land a lot like guitar licks: concise, fragmented lines that are repeated over and over so that they take on more weight, then sink, then reemerge. “Wash yourself clean” turns from a command into a mantra. “The new Jesus” morphs into “there’s no Jesus.” “I lose it all then I start again” is the main anchor of “Compelled by Christy”, establishing the context for the song that follows it, the one about their house catching fire. In other words, it makes you wait for its pay off, and as you move through the album, each line – whether deliberately or inadvertently – seems to build on the one that came before it. 

“I’ve always been fascinated by nonlinear, apparently disparate images that carry an undercurrent of continuity,” Henderson explains of his approach, which draws on the prose of 17th century English writer John Milton as much as Virginia Woolf. “One aspect of that is the lines that really stick out – lines that, on their face, can feel somewhat brazen or striking. Like in ‘Jaundiced and reaching for a mother’, talking about various plants and flora and then bringing about pollen and running parallels to that with semen and ejaculating – things like that are such a striking image to me but one that really carries a lot of the weight and does a lot of the lifting as to what effect I want to have in the lyrics.”

A throughline is language of the body – body language. This can be disturbing and abstract. “Stomach as a tower and the globules descending” is one visceral, visual track title that expresses so much even as it raises more questions than it answers and evokes something from a banned Sam Raimi outtake. Henderson doesn’t want his body language to feel romantic. He wants it to be what it is, he tells me: blunt, real, unaffected but evocative. “I want it to feel like insects spawning. I want it to feel like animals, but I want it to feel human, and I want it to feel emotional and psychological. It’s really hard to create that sense through just one specific image or one specific narrative sequence of lines, so that’s why I wanted to work on something that was a bit more disparate, but carries that undercurrent of continuity that gets you there.”

Henderson says that more often than not nowadays their audience comes to the show knowing the lyrics. In the past, whenever he’d barrel down into the front row and shove the mic in people’s faces, they’d typically offer a random, id-driven scream. “People still do that. I honestly love it. There’s something about just being put on the spot and just yelling a couple syllables randomly that I think is really fun,” he says. 

At the same time, though, he explains that “the whole point of our show is to be conversational with the audience, so it helps a lot when they can say things back to me. At least for me as a listener, when I go to a concert, and I already love a song, and I already attach certain significances to it, all of a sudden when I hear it play, it means that much more. So having time to breathe and let an album settle in the minds of the people who are going to see it, that is always going to make a live show better.”

This works the other way around, too: they make the recordings better by injecting live energy. You’ve heard every band ever talk about this kind of thing, but few actually pull it off and take it seriously. One way Truck Violence do it, besides writing in the room as a four and using a DIY production approach, is the vocal tick – similar to that purge-scream thing that Henderson says people in the crowd will throw his way. 

From Militarie Gun to Hatebreed to Culture Abuse, a trope of heavy, hardcore-adjacent music is these vocal ticks or exclamations: an “OOH,” an “UGH,” or a growl to punctuate or see in a section change. Weathervane is littered with them: the very first thing you hear is an elongated growl rising from the deep. There’s a tight, full-stop “Ooh” that cues the first section change of “Jaundiced”. On “New Jesus”, Henderson explains, the oohs are almost like percussion – carefully timed and integrated into the rhythmic backbone of the song. 

“There’s something interesting, there’s something playful, about integrating what is otherwise a purely live show of emotion, or some sort of expression in a part that doesn’t necessarily need it, and integrating it into the song,” Henderson says. “It’s not just a fuck I’m so hyped up right now, and I want to just yell unintelligibly [thing]. I personally love them.”

Having approached Truck Violence from the hardcore direction, I’d naively assumed that they were embedded in and embraced by this scene that has allowed bands like Turnstile and High Vis to challenge the genre’s scope, folding in lots of other styles. 

“Hardcore hates us,” Henderson says. 

“I wouldn’t necessarily say hardcore hates us,” Hart counters. “I would say we’ve had some weird experiences in hardcore-siloed festivals, or places where people are expecting slam or they’re expecting breakdowns and all of the tropes of hardcore. Everybody’s got the black shirts, and when you see a sea of hardcore people, it’s like, okay, this is not going to be a show for us.”

Back to Henderson: “I think that most people in the hardcore community would admit that the hardcore scene is very closed-minded. On average we do get some hardcore support, but that’s not where the bulk of it comes from. I think that a lot of the people that are probably going to enjoy our music, or that will have a lot of musical relation to it, are people with very eclectic music tastes – the kind of people who are kind of all over the map in that respect, and are into the nerdier side of music.”

It’s that classic case of too heavy for x and too out-there for y, but it’s not only that – seemingly, there’s a general sense of distrust from certain swathes of the community. The band has been called sell outs, even nepo babies. They’re neither. The former refers to support they received from the Canadian provincial government, which awards generous, though competitive, grants to artists. Clegg says they wouldn’t be here without this support. The latter is totally clutching at straws: they recorded the album in a studio Clegg’s dad owns. But he’s not some fancy pop producer. “His friend with one leg built that fucking studio, bro, over the course of months,” Clegg rolls his eyes. 

That idea of not being able to control your narrative ties in with the album’s central theme: being subject to the weather, no matter what you do. “You’re sort of at the whim of the world in a way, or at the whim of your desires, your sensory desires, or the desires that have nil to do with you, but only affect you,” Henderson says. That’s him on the cover art, a literal human weathervane balanced on a traditional rural farmhouse that’s been dumped unceremoniously on a busy double-lane street in Montreal. 

“Basically, the image is supposed to evoke the ultimate subject that is subject to all but has no subject to it, has no object of its own,” he continues. “It is just totally up to everything else, but that is the overriding theme in the album – just the intense movement and change, whether one wills it or wills it not. It just sort of occurs.”

They don’t spell it out, but managing to preserve the intimacy and authenticity of four friends in a room – four people making art that’s democratic and hyper-specific, confrontational and cathartic – feels like one antidote to this. A couple thousand miles from rural Alberta, they’ve witnessed its same sandbox ethos in British resort towns. At times, they’ve experienced similarly small-town bickering and mudslinging in the music scene. You can’t escape the inescapable; all you can do is make it make sense internally. One weathervane, four bodies.