Interview: TRAAMS

It’s all too refreshing to see the faces of TRAAMS once again, albeit in their dimly lit Chichester rehearsal room by way of a fuzzy zoom call. The three-piece are back and making some of their most compelling music to date, with ‘The Greyhound’ arriving back in August as a soaring nine-minute epic, reminding us just what we’ve been missing since they pulled on the brakes.

The track packed all the unique traits we’ve come to love about the band, a sense of grit and angst, the aching vocals of Stuart Hopkins and an unfaltering sense of discovery and impulse.

We waste little time in getting the conversation underway, reminiscing on shows and line-ups which now feel like a lifetime ago, it’s hard not to feel a burgeoning excitement.

How does it feel to be back in the fold guys?

Leigh: It’s fallen into place quite quickly, we hadn’t really been doing anything this whole time, we’d been off as a band. We’d been talking loads about when and what we’re going to do. I don’t think we’ll feel like we’re back until we’re gigging again. It’s just nice to get in a room again and write without having to rehearse live sets, it’s purely writing. It gave us a bit of a kick up the ass having the song out as well. It reminded us people are listening still and there was such a nice reaction to it. It’s motivated us in the writing stages.

Stuart: We’ve been working on ‘The Greyhound’ and a couple of other bits for a while. It’s been quite liberating because when we finished our last live show three or four

years ago, we knew we were going to take a hiatus, we didn’t put a cap on it though and I think loads of people thought we were going to break up. We always knew though, we just kept our heads down and the reaction to being back with this track has been lovely.

Do you think there’s a renewed freshness given the fact you’ve had a break?

S: I think going away for that period and then coming back helped, where bands had obviously seen us when they weren’t even bands was quite a nice thing. It almost flipped it around and now we’re back in the mix a bit. It was nice to come back because we wanted to as opposed to it being something we had to do. It was nice to all go away and then come back and say, do you want to do more rather than having people breathing down our necks.

there were things happening that meant we had to take a hiatus. We met up a few times and got drunk and had fun but also spent a long time thinking about what we were going to do next because the third album is proper.

Words by Rhys Buchanan.

Read the full interview in Issue Twenty-Eight