Band Interview: Trank
Games, Brrraaains & A Head-Bang Life are pleased to bring you an interview with alternative rock band, Trank.
1. How did you get started as a band?
Well we’re a young band of older guys, aren’t we ? We all had experience in various semi pro or professional bands before we formed TRANK – but this project is the first we’ve been involved in that we feel truly deserves the pro treatment, and to go the extra mile. Julien (guitars) and myself (vocals and synths / programming) first met in 2015. I was in a successful local cover band, but hungry for creating own songs, and just looked up the ads – turns out Julien was demoing like there was no tomorrow and looking for a vocalist, and his tracks had the exact balance I was looking for to lay vocals on – powerful but melodic, catchy but emotional and intense. Johann (drums) joined us soon afterwards – he was an old friend from work whom I knew to be a great drummer in search for a project, so I called him when we realized there was something really worth progressing in our first demos – unlike many drummers, he doesn’t feel that he has to choose between sounding massive OR refined : he does both, and so he brought an element of both power and texture to the songs that really took them to the next level – and he’s also perfectly capable of playing to sequences, which lets us use machines in the arrangements to enhance the atmosphere of the songs. Last but not least David (bass) joined in the summer of 2016, after we went through a fairly long series of candidates for bass players; and he brought that sort of 90’s alternative metal or stoner vibe to the sound of the band – that’s when the final brick in our sound and gang dynamics fell into place.
2. How would you describe your sound?
Ha ! We’ve been trying to do that for years. Best is if you listen. We’re hard to label or pin down to one “style” because what we play is at the crossroads of many styles – it’s alternative rock with elements of both 80’s post-punk electronics and 90’s alternative metal, like the bastard child SoundGarden and Depeche Mode could have made with Killing Joke and Muse in the delivery room.
3. What bands/artists would you say have influenced your style of music?
We’ve all been lifelong music fans and we all have extremely diverse and eclectic tastes, so you’d need a dozen pages to answer that properly. And it would be a different list for the four of us. For me (Michel, vocals) – it goes from Bach to Mozart to Beethoven to Brahms to Satie to Billie Holiday to Miles Davis to Bill Evans to Ella to Monk to Elvis to Dylan to the Beatles to the Kinks to the Velvet Underground to John Martyn to Pink Floyd to King Crimson to Kraftwerk to Bowie to Eno to Zeppelin to Queen to AC DC to Motorhead to the Clash to P.I.L to Wire to everything on Mute Records in the 80’s and 90’s to Aimée Mann to Emmylou Harris to Nine Inch Nails to minimal techno to Rammstein to Talk Talk to Pixies to Alison Krauss to the Smiths to the Cure to Joy Division and New Order to ZTT to trance to Underworld to LFO to Portishead to Bjork to Gus Gus to Emiliana Torrini to Etienne Daho to Serge Gainsbourg to Black Sabbath to Peter Gabriel to Kate Bush to Steve Reich to Porcupine Tree to Royal Blood. And that’s only a fraction. On some level I guess everything has an influence on what we put in our songs, even though Soundgarden, Depeche Mode and early Muse might be the most obvious ones.
4. Has the rise of YouTube & music streaming helped or hindered you as a band?
Bit of both. YouTube hindered at first, until we met Alban, our visual director. His videos for us have helped us get to the next level – including being noticed by the likes of Deep Purple, Anthrax, Disturbed and Papa Roach, who all invited us to open for them. As for streaming – we’re old schoolers, so we do still play full albums (I even have a it of an OCD whereby I play albums in coherent series of 5 or 6 in the same style, then I move on to the next series…), and we think of our songs as parts of what ultimately will become an album. We like the notion of an album or a show taking people on to a journey of sorts, with each song being its self contained journey within that. To that extent – plus the mostly terrible sound quality – I’m not a huge fan of streaming. But it isn’t like we have a choice, is it ? And it’s sort of liberated a lot of artists from the grip of major labels, so that’s good.
5. What do you enjoy doing when you’re not making music?
Thinking about the next time we will. And listening to other people’s music.
6. What are your future plans musically? Tours?
Well – Our first album, “The Ropes,” is coming out again in November as a Deluxe edition. It came out as a standard album during lockdown, got rave reviews and the little stock of CDs we had quickly sold out – but we’re proud enough of it that we want to give it a proper release and a bigger audience, and luckily enough we’ve been picked up by a proper distributor, M&O music, who work with Believe Digital for online distribution, and with Season of Mist for brick and mortar stores. It’s the same album with just a touch of re-mastering – but also we’ve added 12 very cool remixes to the 12 original songs. That will be available online at all the usual suspect places, and also as a CD from our distributor, M&O records. We’ve just released a 3D video for one of the remixes, and there’ll be another video (with us in it this time) for “Shining” – the opening track on the album, at the same time as the re release. After that we’ve got a full “live in the studio” session that we recorded this summer which we’ll start releasing song by song next year, while we’re working on the songs that will make up the second album. And in the meantime we hope to return to the stage as soon as humanly possible. That’s what we live for.
Links
Spotify | Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
