Truth Club Are On the Move

There’s this joke about Ohioans in North Carolina, that, if you go to any beach in the Tar Heel State during the summer, you’re likely to find a few dozen cars with Buckeye license plates. For the last century, the two states have also argued over who gets to claim the Wright brothers as their own (Orville and Wilbur were raised in Dayton and both died there; their first sustained flight took place in Kitty Hawk). That being said, I feel a strong, unwavering kinship for North Carolina. My mother to this day regrets not going to UNC for college; my first vacation ever was to Atlantic Beach 23 years ago. And thankfully, North Carolina is having—quite possibly—the best 2023 out of any U.S. state, at least in terms of the music it’s produced. Already this year, folks like Wednesday, Indigo De Souza, Fust and Sluice have put out massive records; the Mountain Goats have a new gem on its way at the end of the month; and, of course, Truth Club have just released one of the best rock LPs of 2023, Running From the Chase.

On Bandcamp, Truth Club—Travis Harrington, Yvonne Chazal, Kameron Vann and Elise Jaffe—have classified Running From the Chase as “alternative,” “avent ferry garde,” “good,” “indie rock,” “post-punk” and “rare earth metal.” All of those tags feel right, to some degree, even if some of them feel exclusively tailored to Truth Club and Truth Club alone. The work they make exists somewhere on a spectrum between the disaffected emo of Joyce Manor and the snarling growl of Fontaines D.C., yet they’ve crafted an aura and a sound that is strictly their own and shaped by where they want to go, not by the distinct, wide-ranging palette of tunes coming out all around them in North Carolina.

Harrington, Chazal and Jaffe met while attending college together, popping in and out of house shows in Raleigh and being heavily engaged with—and involved in—the college’s radio station, 88.1 WKNC-FM. Vann and Harrington had had a “literature rock” band in high school, Astro Cowboy, but the two musicians went to separate colleges—Vann’s being Appalachian State in Boone; Harrington’s being NC State. Harrington had found himself in some creative spurts, continuing the work he and Vann were doing back home without a band to distill it into. “I had been playing in my room and writing a bunch of songs and wanted to start a new project,” he explains. “And it’s really hard to find people who play drums. Elise said that she played drums, so I was like, ‘Well, I have a few songs, let’s get together and see how it meshes.’ And it meshed really well.” They’d had someone else on bass, but their presence in the group didn’t work out—and there was a tour booked that couldn’t be cancelled. So Harrington called up Vann and asked him if he’d do him and Jaffe a favor and join them for the shows—and, though it didn’t take much convincing, Vann remained a member afterwards.

Truth Club played their first gig in 2017 in Durham with LVL UP. A local band had pulled out of the gig late, and they wormed their way in and suggested themselves as the new opener. It worked, and it cemented the destiny of the group in a lot of ways. Because Vann was living three hours away in Boone and Harrington and Jaffe were looking towards writing the songs that would, eventually, form the skeleton of their debut album Not An Exit, they called upon Chazal to help work on bass parts and some of the writing. Harrington, Jaffe and Vann would track a few songs in Appalachian State’s recording program’s studio and do a few more in a house in a house in Raleigh. Just before Truth Club finished recording the vocals for Not An Exit in the summer of 2018, they had a conversation about making Chazal a full-time member and expanding the band into a four-piece—which is the version of the band that we’ve got with us now.

The band, through some encouragement and guidance from Karl Kuehn—who was Harrington’s mentor in high school and now makes music as Gay Meat—were able to get onto Tiny Engines’ roster right before the label came under scrutiny for withholding royalty payments. (Kuehn’s old band Museum Mouth was also from Wilmington, and he became Harrington and Vann’s guiding light—and Harrington goes as far as calling Kuehn “one of the only responsible adults” who was in the milieu of the city’s scene at the time.) But Not An Exit was a success that firmly put Truth Club on the map, establishing the foursome as a budding, marquee name in alt-rock. It was a great debut where you could tell that, whenever their next LP was set to arrive, it was going to send them through the stratosphere—and that’s exactly what Running From the Chase has done and will continue to do.

It’s been four years since Not An Exit—and, of course, the pandemic has made two of those years feel like 20—and, yet again, Truth Club were tasked with shopping a record around in search of a home. They finished recording Running From the Chase in 2022 and began sending it to labels in September. “We did a two-week tour with Wednesday and, at that point, a lot of that tour was trying to get people from labels to come and see us play,” Jaffe explains. They ironed out a roster spot with Double Double Whammy in March 2023, landing them in the same orbit as Babehoven, Al Menne, The Glow and skirts after Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman helped get Running From the Chase at the top of the label’s to-listen-to pile. It’s a perfect match, as Truth Club brings a heavier, crystallized type of imagery and instrumentation that counteracts Double Double Whammy’s propensity for folk-inspired, singer/songwriter records. With Truth Club on board, the label’s spectrum is filled out and perfect. But you don’t hear so often about what it’s like for bands who are caught in limbo, having to put faith in new distros every time they make an album. “It definitely took a bit of patience,” Harrington says. “It’s weird, now that things feel secure, reflecting back on it.”

The backed-up release schedules from COVID, paired with the delays in vinyl production, didn’t bode well for a labelless band with an entire record ready to go. The response that Truth Club was getting from labels before Double Double Whammy scooped them up was that Running From the Chase sounded good, but they wouldn’t be able to put it out until 2024—and those were conversations being had at the end of 2022. Not to mention, some of the songs on this record were written four or five years ago, while the band was waiting for Not An Exit to come out. “I do remember the serious weight and stress of us having been playing these songs for so long and sitting on them for so long and just being so giddy to get them out,” Vann adds. “Having those conversations with those labels and being like, ‘Well, it’d be cool to entertain putting this out with that label, but 2024 is just way too out there. It’s too far.”

Once folks started getting vaccinated and touring felt like a more stable endeavor once again, Truth Club opted to get back on the road and massage that muscle again. They took some of those years-old tracks and refined the arrangements, polishing and dressing them up into more potent, fully realized badges of rock ‘n’ roll. “We had a lot of stuff that we were building upon that was old and, obviously, a lot of new new ideas, too,” Harrington says. “I think that [Running From the Chase] is a combination of both of those things, in a cool way. There are quite a few songs that are, by our measure, pretty old. But, there are a lot of really fresh songs, and it’s cool at the end of it—seeing that all come together in a way where it feels cohesive and fresh and coherent together.”

Running From the Chase is a really great record for many reasons, one of them being that it’s a real mark of Harrington tracing the throughlines of his own struggles across the dozen tracks. He wrote part of it during an acute bout with depression and bipolar disorder, and lines like “I felt my sprawl, uncanny, brush against your sharp edge. No mistaking my life for anything but pliant” on “Siphon” and “Carry me out to the sky, I need the sunlight. Under a false lens, even your face looks so unkind. Hopelessness asserts itself, not the last time. Still can’t shake it, how surely it states its case and undoes mine” on “Exit Cycle” showcase the different hues of his own emoticons. There’s a real bitter rawness afoot, a poetic look at ugliness told through the language of a songwriter whose grasp on melody and meter is evocative of a courageous, unabashed unfurling. Harrington took a break from the songs to find personal clarity and recovery, only to return with a new grasp on the material he’d previously conjured.

“It was cool to trace back the lines of these struggles at a time when I was struggling a lot less,” he says. “Those feelings and struggles felt a bit more distant, and it was interesting to try and, in a weird way, empathize with those things while not consciously feeling them. It was a cool self-reflective exercise. When you’re struggling, it’s hard to finish anything and finish anything in a coherent way. The songs aren’t just about being depressed, but it’s hard to write a song where that’s the emotional reflex when you’re actually that low—because you’re just not super motivated. It was an interesting exercise, to try and embody those feelings and nodes of origin in a mode where I wasn’t actively feeling those things and trying to sympathize with that.”

Running From the Chase is not an immediate reflection of purposeful recovery and self-care; it’s an honest portrait of that being an intuitive part of Harrington’s life. Only in a few songs did he consciously try to capture that clarity in a narrative, but what he waxes about are byproducts of lived experience. The movements on the record became a natural trajectory for him as a songwriter. He brings up an either/or, which he admits might be a false binary, where “if you’re struggling, you either continue to struggle perpetually or, eventually, there is going to be ascension and recovery from that.” The writing on Running From the Chase is economical from a place of equity. Harrington spent a lot of time considering what parts of himself were worth giving to listeners, what stories were worth telling in the name of making at least one personal feel heard—rather than just tilting the ego fully on himself under the guise of Truth Club as a collective.

“I was exploring this idea of music about insular struggle,” Harrington explains. “It can be grotesque and not so helpful. I mean, I think that the goal of shared music and performed music is to empathize with the listener base, the exchange of feeling seen by a song—and the listenership validating that, making you feel seen as a writer. It doesn’t even matter that I’m personally singing, it’s just cool that a song can do that—the collective rallying around a song. I feel like music that is coming from a place of darkness, sometimes it can be unhelpful. If there’s no triumph—and the conscious desire to do that is like, ‘Okay, well, if I just write a song about being super bummed, what is that really doing?’ That’s really only serving myself. Not to say that the truth of those experiences were adapted to fit a more convenient and palatable narrative or anything, but it’s just about what is worth sharing with other people and what’s worth reflecting on in a personal sense.”

The album boasts some of the better rock songs of the year, especially “Uh Oh,” a drawling, introspective bliss tinged with dimples of shoegaze and sludge—with Harrington’s vocals arriving especially gauzy, as if Alex G is trying to perfect a Slowdive impersonation. And then, on “Exit Cycle,” the band brings in Indigo De Souza to punctuate a song already washed in spectral instrumentation and ruminative, somber artifacts of reckoning. “If I could climb out and break free, I would open doors and let all this off, let go,” Harrington and De Souza, who were childhood friends, harmonize together. The two grew up having a mutual acknowledgement of both wanting to orient their entire lives around making music and, when Harrington and Alex Farrar were tracking her vocals in the studio and she belted out her only line, they looked at each other and knew, instantly, that what just occurred was game-changing—and it was, as “Exit Cycle” might just land at the top of folks’ end-of-year song lists. I know it’ll be on mine.

The way Truth Club achieved the rich soundscapes of Running From the Chase came from a mix of two techniques: It always begins with the band in a room together, with Jaffe recording drums live while everyone’s amps are sectioned off into different spaces, and then they get to work on overdubs. But one of the most essential pieces of the puzzle is the living, breathing constructive feedback that the foursome is always instilling into the live space. To see a Truth Club record through is to find comfortability in bouncing ideas off of each other at any moment. It’s not that each player is responsible solely for their parts; Harrington or Vann might bring a core guitar part into the studio but not have any clue what everyone else’s phrasing should sound like—so everyone falls in and works out the kinks as a unit. Rather than having a one beacon of arrangement guidance, the whole band throws out ideas at various checkpoints of completeness. It’s a hopeful portrait, that Truth Club aren’t unwilling to get into the muck of the process with one another. Good bands know each other’s strengths; great bands have enough trust in themselves as a collective to challenge those high points for the greater good of a record.

“There’s consistent feedback happening, I remember—many times—working on these songs and coming through with an idea on a guitar part or a bass part. It’s like moving everyone’s parts around,” Vann says. “And then, vice versa, me changing a certain note or a rhythmic input based off of something Elise changes. It’s us in a room, making the songs and vamping on a part so one of us can hone in on which notes we’re trying to find out. There’s been so many times where it’s just like, ‘Hey, I have this guitar lick in my head, can y’all literally just play that section over and over and over for, like, five minutes straight?’”

The chemistry between the four musicians is dynamic, and they each have their own specific approaches to writing: Harrington and Jaffe are interested in that “band-in-a-room” style of organic workshopping that so many bands are adopting post-COVID, while Vann and Chazal tend to make a recording, work on it on their own time away from the studio and then return with something more delineated. The ideas tend to germinate from a kernel that Harrington brings to the table, and then everyone weighs in on what direction those early generations might take.

“Feedback is welcome and heavily considered,” Harrington says. “There have been plenty of times [where I have] strong ideas and I’ll be like, ‘I’m really stoked on this,’ and then everyone else is like, ‘I don’t really see this right now.’ So, it’s a thing where, if I really want to fight for that, the onus is on me to revise it to a point that everybody else feels engaged with it. Sometimes I’ll bring a whole song and everybody’s like, ‘Yeah, no, this is cool’ and everybody’s down with that. But, then there’s other times where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I don’t vibe with this’ and I’m like, ‘Okay, maybe that hurts my feelings a little bit but, also, that’s fair, because we’re all engaged in this process together.’ That’s important. I think the coolest thing is that we’re all just trying to serve the song.”

And, during the process, everyone in the band has been finding their own pockets of comfort and expression—a process that spurred into a confidence that continued to swell throughout the making of Running From the Chase. It bodes well for the future of Truth Club, but you can already hear it in the song “It’s Time,” a one-off single that came out in January of this year but was written and recorded after they finished making Running From the Chase. In some ways, it feels even more massive than this album, and it’s a strong, fruitful, wondrous precursor to where the band might turn next. A big reason why Truth Club have set their gaze upon the cosmos this time around can be traced back to bringing Alex Farrar on as producer—as he’s worked with everyone from Wednesday to Squirrel Flower to Waxahatchee to Snail Mail to Hotline TNT.

Farrar came out to a show Truth Club did with Indigo De Souza in Asheville and then, when Jaffe was working from home at De Souza’s house the next day, he DM’d the band and asked to meet up. He co-runs Drop of Sun Studios and has, rather quickly, changed the layout of rock ‘n’ roll in North Carolina completely. “He has this really wide range, really good disposition,” Jaffe says. “We felt, genuinely, like we got to know him so well. We were recording ‘Break the Stones,’ with much heavier guitar parts than we had done before, and I just remember, at some point, listening back and Alex grinned and looked at us and he was like, ‘That’s what you get when you record with a metalhead.’” Chazal echoes that statement, as well, bringing up how Farrar made the band feel at home at Drop of Sun—the first time they’ve ever really made anything in a big, professional studio space.

“I think, coming in, we were super wide-eyed and like, ‘Wow, we can’t believe we get this opportunity,’ but that came along with some nerves for me, at the very least, and Alex did such a good job of making us feel comfortable and he was able to pull everything out of us in a way that really made the songs shine in the best way they could. I think he’s so good at making guitar sounds as big as they possibly can. That truly is a strength of his,” Chazal adds.”

Running From the Chase features some great moments of self-sampling, be it adding the sounds from a game of musical chairs to “Break the Stones” or Jaffe and Chazal micking themselves up while running over some hi-hat cymbals with a truck on “Suffer Debt.” Harrington cites the off-kilter noises and strange background rumblings on Slint records as inspiration for him in those moments. “The other engineer at Drop of Son, Adam [McDaniel], he just happened to be there while we were tracking—and I remember he was like, ‘Oh, I’ve been meaning to run some of these cymbals over,’ and I think I was tracking guitars and Yvonne and Elise were free and were like, ‘Oh, this seems interesting,’” Harrington notes. That instance also happened to coincide with Jaffe wanting to experiment with new auxiliary percussion elements.

The origins of the musical chairs inclusion aren’t exactly known, though Harrington says he’s always been fond of how Dave Grohl is scraping a chair across the floor at the beginning of Nirvana’s “Marigold.” “It really sounds gross, but I liked the sound of chairs scraping on the ground and I was like, ‘What’s a fun way to do that that implicates all of us and sounds a little bit more candid than just being like “Hey, will you scrape this chair across the ground in front of a microphone?”’” Harrington adds. And, as it’s par for the course of any indoor recess game—like Heads Up 7 Up or Simon Says—one member cheated, and Harrington reveals that it was Jaffe. “It was a really aggressive game of musical chairs,” Jaffe explains. “Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do.”

North Carolina has quickly become as important of a musical ecosystem in America as Nashville, Chicago or Philadelphia—and Truth Club are an essential part in the growing machine. Some of the best music—especially some of the best rock ‘n’ roll—is coming out of there, be it via Wednesday’s critically revered Rat Saw God or through the presence of Sylvan Esso’s studio Betty’s near Chapel Hill. In Harrington and Vann’s hometown of Wilmington, there was a prestigious venue called The Soapbox Laundro Lounge that shut down right when Astro Cowboy started—and it extinguished a flame that helped bring regional touring acts and national bands into the city. “Wilmington felt weirdly insular, but we were lucky enough that word of our made its way to Raleigh—and we played a few shows there and that was where we found about the cool stuff that was going on with college radio and all of the events that they would put on at NC State,” Harrington says.

Chapel Hill is gilded because of the presence and legacy of Merge Records, but Raleigh—at least to Harrington—always had more of a community-based humbleness to it. “Some of the bands lived in a house together called Mattress Fort, and that was such an influential place for a while,” Chazal says. “There were so many really incredible bands that came through and played this house. And it was so cool, because people of all ages could come through and be involved and see stuff that might be put at a bar otherwise and cut off a ton of people from being able to see it.” The house venue that Harrington and Jaffe spent the most time at together prior to deciding to form Truth Club was called Radio Shack, and that’s where they would go on to play their very first gig ever. They would also share bills at that spot with De Souza and MJ Lenderman, folks who they’ve grown up with and have each gone from playing two-dozen-cap sets to making beloved, nationally recognized albums.

“It was not a super accommodating space, in terms of size and watching bands play,” Harrington admits. “But, somehow, they would get such cool bands to play there. We ended up playing a show with Horse Jumper [of Love] and Spencer Radcliffe. Crumb played there, and they shouldn’t have played there. It was madness. Vagabon played there, in a living room that fit, maybe, 20 people on a good night. It was very cool to have that kind of place. I think, for a while, in most college towns, there was a really potent network of houses that booked that intermingling of local artists and then artists who would tour through there. There was a really good practice of making sure that exchange happened. We’re only able to do what we’re doing now because of that influence and being able to have this access to all of these artists who were coming from around the country—and us being able to bond as musicians and players because of our shared appreciation for what those bands were doing.”

Truth Club are special—and not just because they made a record as good as Running From the Chase. I mean, of course that is a part of it. How could it not be? But what I’m trying to say is: These four musicians were destined to make music together, and I’m so glad that they do. The work is steadfast and unshakeable. “Is there still a blossom yearning to return to form and carve a path again? How I’ve wept, tired of waking up in a trance like both halves contort in me. So, is this really working? For you, for me, for them, for anyone?” Harrington sings at the very end of Running From the Chase. He, Jaffe, Vann and Chazal have gone through the ringer together, navigating long periods in-between recording and releasing, being unable to tour because of COVID and, most importantly, having to shop both of their albums to new labels. It’s par for the course of being a musician, especially in this landscape we’re in—but it’s a routine that can, and has, broken bands. Yet, thankfully, Truth Club remain and Truth Club will endure.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.