St Albans quintet Trash Boat have released new track, ‘Are You Ready Now?’, taken from the band’s new album, ‘Heaven Can Wait’, set for release on October 4th via Hopeless Records.
Speaking of the track, frontman Tobi Duncan shares, “Are You Ready Now is an ode to our seemingly approaching doom as a society. As cliche as that is and as often as people say this from era to era, each generation must learn their own suffering. We see it every day on the news and in our lives, crime is increasing, corruption, depression, global warming, deceit and pain. We all try our best to live under the shadow of these problems while making the best of things, but it remains difficult when we are reminded so frequently of how bad things are getting. The little efforts we as people can make seem more diminished with each passing tragedy and it makes small acts of kindness and selflessness seem futile.
Despite all of this we should all aspire to continue, each of us doing whatever we can to make the world a brighter place. Our music is just one thing we are giving to the world to try and make it brighter. This is a melancholy song, but hopefully it also inspires hope and a sense of honour and duty whilst also reassuring people that its not your responsibility to shoulder the entire worlds worth of burdens. I hope people can listen to this song and feel a combination of responsibility, but also relief and reassurance that there are still things we can enjoy for what they are. No matter how seemingly small.”
“Life is pretty chaotic,” begins Trash Boat vocalist Tobi Duncan by way of explaining his band’s fervent fourth full-length album. “The world is pretty chaotic. I’m pretty chaotic, and this album is every piece of me and us as a band”
Welcome to the world of Heaven Can Wait: a knotty, gnarled riddle of a record, at one turn deeply introspective, full of deep-seated questions, anxiety and despondency; at the next fuelled by a righteous rage towards an unjust, uncaring world stuck in a downward spiral. “I just wanna change the world, but I don’t know where to begin,” Duncan sings on the twisting, Britpop-channelling free fall of Delusions Of Grandeur. “I’ve already changed myself, a different me every weekend.”
Anyone paying attention to Trash Boat’s indomitable ascent through alternative rock’s upper echelons will find little to surprise in those statements. The band’s preceding third album, 2021’s Don’t You Feel Amazing?, elevated the quintet – completed by guitarists Ryan Hyslop and Dann Bostock, bassist James Grayson and drummer Oakley Moffatt – to the cover of esteemed tastemaker publications including Kerrang! and Upset, racking up 19m global streams off the back of key editorial playlist looks fronting Spotify’s The Rock List and Amazon’s Rock Scene. But more so, it served to shatter the constrained box into which expectation of the band previously had neatly sat. “I think people had come to expect a very particular sound from Trash Boat, and Don’t You Feel Amazing? was us exploring different sides, influences and inspirations, and finding our true sound,” Duncan reflects. “Heaven Can Wait, which we collectively self-produced, is an extension of that journey of exploration. As a band, we don’t have a singular artistic direction. We’re a cloud of chaos.”
Across its 11 shapeshifting tracks, Heaven Can Wait crackles with a white-hot energy. There’s the Deftones-invoking double salvo of Watching Heaven… Burn; the skittish Linkin Park-sounding filthy/RIGHTEOUS, for which Crossfaith’s Kenta Koie lends a thrilling guest vocal; and the slow-burn Are You Ready Now?, boasting, Duncan beams, a throat-shredding 22-second-long scream. It’s Trash Boat at their “heaviest, slowest, fastest, most complicated and contradictory”, the frontman attests.
“I’m not trying to paint a pretty picture that is nice to look at or that’s easily digestible,” Duncan says of Heaven Can Wait. “I’m simply trying to paint an honest picture, and get as much of myself into these songs as possible. It’s direct. It’s unfiltered. It’s raw.”
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