ALBUM OF THE MONTH: The weathervane is my body

“They sound like their name.”

That’s what my fiancé said to me after I (somewhat psychotically) played her ‘House caught fire’ after we got home from our performance of Taming of the Shrew. (She’s playing Bianca, I directed and produced it. If you’re in NYC the final weekend of July 2026, you can still see it as of this post going live, tickets are here, though it’s selling fast).

I have to agree with her: I can’t think of many bands that sound as much like their name as Truck Violence; as a matter of fact, when I first heard about the band, their name is what drew me in. That and that fact that they recently signed to The Flenser, seemingly my favorite record label these days: two of my favorite releases last year, Agriculture’s The Spiritual Sound and the Chat Pile / Hayden Pedigo collaboration record In the Earth Again, were released by the Flenser.

The Flenser call themselves a “dark music label” and that nomenclature really lets them stretch their roster’s aesthetic. The bands on the label are all metal adjacent, but they also dabble in other genres, thus making their records stand out.

Case in point: Truck Violence have punk, bluegrass, metal, and good ol’ fashioned alt-rock in their DNA. I can’t think of many bands that blend more than two sub-genres, let alone four.

Truthfully, their lead single for this record ‘New Jesus’ didn’t quite do it for me. I found it too abrasive and a little off putting. And where the heck was that bluegrass that music blogs were so keen to point out???

So how did we get here?

Well, July was a pretty slow music month. Aside from the Kelela record and the Charli record, nothing else caught my attention.

To set the scene: it was July 18th and I was headed to a Saturday performance of Taming, commuting from a friend’s debut boxing fight if you must know. I was listening to a different record, homing in on my album choice for the month. Something struck me, I don’t know what, but on a stalled L train into Manhattan, I pulled up Apple Music, paused that other record, and decided to give The weathervane is my body a spin.

When say I’m a fan of “heavy music” I’m typically referring to music that broadly falls under the labels of “punk” and “metal” and their many sub-genres.

While modern music consumption has homogenized a lot of genre principles, there are a few I'd like to note:

Punk:

• Simple, hooky guitar riffs and drum patterns

• Quotable, highly repetitive sing-along lyrics

• Anger as a primary inspiration

Metal:

• Complex instrumentation, exemplifies technical prowess

• Lyrics are more metaphorical, vocals as much about texture than discernment

• Pain as a primary inspiration

With titles like ‘My dog would fuck the air’ and ‘Stomach as a tower and the globules descending,’ Truck Violence definitely peddle in miserable images typical of metal, yet they sound angry as hell. Early standout ‘Jaundiced and reaching for a mother’ emphatically mixes the genre principles to exhilarating effect.

Like the best punk singers, vocalist and founding member Karsyn Henderson turns a short phrase, “I was born Jaundiced,” into a rallying cry that would open up any pit: it’s simple, catchy, and brutal. The repetition of the words allows their meaning to journey from misery through anger until they finally land on triumph.

Near the song’s end, the onslaught suddenly pauses and the instrumentation blossoms: suddenly we are in psych-metal power riff mode. This moment is an essential brief reprieve from the song’s bleakness and without it, I don’t know if I could handle this track. For me, it’s an early clue that Truck Violence are just as invested in salvation as they are in nihilism.

While ‘Jaundiced’ piqued my curiosity, ‘House caught fire’ is the song that first took my breath away. I’m unsure if it’s magic will be diluted when it’s ripped out of context but let me try to capture it.

‘House caught fire’ is one of the two purely bluegrass ballads on the record, performed solely with vocals and banjo. It’s the first time on Weathervane we hear the naked and tender side Henderson’s vocals; his voice is cracked with emotion, as if he is wringing every last drop of feeling out of it and guitarist Paul Lecours’ banjo plucking is the perfect complement.

This refrain makes up the first half of the song:

The toddler falls/
Under the sop of its knees and rests its bulging head/
Thinking 'bout it/
Thinking 'bout it brings me down/
Thinking 'bout it/
And don't you act like a pussy/
When you lose everything/
When you're thinking 'bout it/
Thinking 'bout it brings me down/
Thinking 'bout it’

I mean, given the song’s title, I’m immediately picturing a man sitting by the ashes of his former home, his banjo the only possession spared from the flames. Not knowing how to process the immense loss, he begins to sing. Not only do I hear bluegrass, but in the song’s transmutation of pain into something stunning, I also hear the blues, the parent genre of bluegrass.

I can’t stop thinking about it.

While I typically like to wrap up my reviews with my own thoughts, as I was working on this review’s final edit, I stumbled across this lovely piece of prose on the band’s Bandcamp:

‘Karsyn Henderson and Paul Lecours grew up in a French-Canadian town of 600 people, graduating in a class of nine. By fifteen they were running a local studio and radio station. There was no industry support, no infrastructure, no template for what they were trying to do, only the work itself and the conviction that it was worth doing.’

Without a template, the band has been freed to write music their own way: sure, I wrote about two tracks, but there’s also the folk-metal breakdown in ‘Your name, it’s walking’ and the hope-filled, deeply earned, awestruck highs of ‘Kindly, wash yourself’ and ‘Stomach as a tower and the globules descending’ sounds like a Tool song if Tool was actually good.

With no infrastructure, no industry support, and a graduating class of NINE PEOPLE, Truck Violence have been freed to write songs that sound like nothing else in modern heavy music, yet they do sound like something:

their name.

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