Header image credit: @sleonpics
Back in 2018, I moved down to North Carolina with no connections to the music scene. It took a while to make those inroads (about five years, give or take a few months). But the silly paradox of loving music is that, eventually, there’s spontaneous cross-pollination. It can start simple, like how I knew Sylvan Esso from seeing them up in Vermont in 2013, or the fact that bands like The Mountain Goats and Superchunk are too legendary to miss.
It didn’t take long for Truth Club to become one of those bands. They’ve been featured in Indy Week and Stereogum, a pair of my favorite publications. The longer I made Durham my home, the more often I saw them representing Raleigh and the local scene with their emo-infused blend of indie rock and post-punk.
The band’s second record, Running from the Chase, was an evolution in songwriting, sound, and overall tightness as a four-piece unit. It rightfully earned critical acclaim and launched the band into a packed two years of touring. With their next LP in the works, Travis Harrington (vocals/guitar) sat down with me to reflect on how Truth Club is continuing to grow together.
What is something you’ve been listening to lately?
Travis: I’ve been listening to that Cameron Winter record [Heavy Metal] a lot. There’s this Philly band called Fib who put out a record a couple of months ago [Heavy Lifting] that’s really cool. The band Water from Your Eyes just put out a new single [“Life Signs”] that’s super good.
Nice Price Books & Records in Raleigh has a book club every month or so, and this month was the 33⅓ for Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. I hadn’t done it before, but I loved that record and haven’t listened to it in a while. I figured that would be a fun entry point. I’ve been listening to that while reading the book, contextualizing the sessions that they’re talking about with the songs themselves. That’s been fun.
What is the first musician that you remember discovering on your own and obsessing over?
Travis: The White Stripes. Jack White was the first musician that I felt had the full package, where the artistry, persona, and music itself really captivated me. When I was 13, I was a pretty pathetically staunch classic rock kid. You know, with the cargo shorts and Target t-shirts. I feel like lots of kids have that phase. The White Stripes appealed to my classic rock sensibilities, but was current and weirder.
I owe a lot to that band for getting me out of looking backwards. I’m not drawn to it the same way now, but it was very formative for a 13-year-old. Just all the color coordination and the mythology that he created for himself were like world-building.
How has your musical taste changed since then?
Travis: I’m just more drawn to complex arrangements and dissonance. I’ll dabble in a lot of stuff, but I tend to listen to more guitar-based music than anything.
In college, I found the band SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, and I felt like that really staked me into the ground of “my” kind of music. It’s guitar-focused and led, but the melodies are so interesting, and they do a lot more in terms of how their songs are structured. It’s much more like pop production and has taken a lot from different electronic sub-genres as their sound is developed. It’s like collage music.
Y’all have been busy over the last few years. What were your personal highlights from the touring cycle behind Running From the Chase?
Travis: We got to tour a lot more than we ever really have, and that was really wonderful. Each tour we did was special in its own way. Right after our record came out in fall 2023, we got to do a tour with Squirrel Flower. We were doing support and that was the first time we had toured with a band that we weren’t already friends with beforehand.
Approaching that in itself was kind of a milestone, just anticipating the etiquette and addressing the “Are we gonna get along and be friends, or are we just gonna play these shows together?” question. If it’s the latter, that’s fine, but figuring out how to negotiate that was new. Thankfully, they are all really sweet people and easy to get along with, so we became fast friends. Ella [O’Connor Williams] and I have since become good friends, and I feel grateful for that.
In February 2024, we toured with Indigo de Souza. She’s someone that I’ve been friends with just serendipitously since I was a kid, because our parents had mutual family friends. She’s someone that I love being around, and her music has reached an incredible audience. We got to play some very big shows, and that felt really gratifying.
In May, we went to the West Coast for the first time. We’ve never gone further than Texas, but we got to support Cloud Nothings, which is a band that Kameron [Vann, guitar] and I loved when we were in high school. We listened to Attack on Memory so much that we wore it out. Dylan [Baldi] has a sense of melody and guitar playing that is really hooky but subtly complex. That very much inspired a component of how I wanted to approach songwriting at that age and since. It was a whirlwind to tour with these people who are really inspiring. I was a little nervous at first — “Am I gonna be cool? Are we gonna get along?” — but they were all really nice, we got along super well, and became friends.
The rewarding thing about all of the touring is meeting all of these people who are strangers, and that weird interstitial community. When you’re on tour and gone a lot, you feel less connected to this place as a community. But then there are these friends you make who are all in transit all the time, who you stay connected with. There’s an intuitive understanding between us because of what we do, more than there is based on the place itself.
Image credit: skirtsmusic
Was there a song from the LP that quickly establishes itself as a fan favorite?
Travis: “Uh Oh” has become one. It’s interesting because I feel like when I wrote that song, the energy of it didn’t pulse quite as much. We play around a lot with dynamics and volume, especially live, but that one was static in its intensity a lot of the time. It ended up more dynamic in the recording, but when we play it live, we approach the arrangement with a bit more of a dramatic cadence between the quiet parts and the loud parts. That’s always really fun to play, and playing it that way makes that song a lot more engaging.
People also get stoked when we play “It’s Time”. Elise and Yvonne’s bass and drum groove throughout that whole song is amazing. I feel like so many people have kind things to say about that after we play.
Outside of touring, you’ve also been involved with festivals like Hopscotch and Good Moon in the Triangle. What is it like to be on that elevated stage as a local artist?
Travis: Kameron and I are from Wilmington, which felt very isolated from any nationally touring acts. There was a house show scene, but the best we would get were regional acts from across the state or Virginia. I moved to Raleigh for college and had no idea that Hopscotch was a thing. I had no idea that you could do a music festival like that. I had a pretty true conventional idea of a music festival being like giant stages in the middle of a field somewhere.
Hopscotch is an organism of diverse genres and performers, but also size of fan base and intimacy of the venue. It’s a festival that asks, “What kind of show do you want to go to like?” Do you want to go to a noise band? Do you want to see an indie rock band? Or do you want to see Pusha T at Lincoln Theater? You can go see whatever you want because it caters to an eclectic and diverse music taste, with all these different contexts to engage with it.
That blew my mind, and I felt very lucky that I just happened to end up in a place that had a festival like that every year. Even luckier when Truth Club got invited to play, and we’ve played like three times now. Each time, it’s felt like we’ve been given the opportunity to play in a larger context. We’ve played bigger venues each time with a seemingly more excited audience, and that’s felt really rewarding.
In 2023, we got to play on the City Plaza stage, and I never thought I would get to play on a stage like that. We opened for Pavement, one of my favorite bands of all time. If you’d told 18-year-old Travis that we’d do that, he would’ve been like “Get out of here!” I feel very grateful for our opportunity to participate not only as artists, but as a lover of music. The fact that the day shows are like integrated into the ecosystem is so important as well. Many of the bands that play the paid portion of the festival wind up doing them, so if your intent is to discover cool new bands, then it’s an easy and free way to do it.
How do you navigate the highs and lows of being a touring musician?
Travis: When we were students and performing before the pandemic, we went to a lot of house shows around Raleigh and the Triangle. That helped us realize how touring bands were doing it themselves, which made it more accessible to do the same. We put out our first record [Not an Exit] and tried to tour as much as we could between semesters, and that was hard. We were super young, doing all that stuff for the first time and without any consistent infrastructure. “Are we gonna make any money? Oh, we’re playing at some scary guy’s house tonight? We got a hook up to play at a brewery to a bunch of old people who don’t care and think we sound horrible?”
Front-loading all of that chaos was really hard; there were ups and downs like that, and all of us shared times when we went crazy, and it was too exhausting. But we’re fortunate now that we have more infrastructure. We’re able to tour more reliably because we have a booking agent to help us; we know where we’re gonna stay and know people in the area. Even with the unprecedented elements, like going to the West Coast for the first time, it feels a lot easier and much more triumphant because the rhythm of touring is familiar.
How has y’all’s songwriting approach continued to evolve as a four-piece?
Travis: There was an impression when we started the band that progress is a linear thing. And that’s a misconception that most people have about a lot of things: if you’re not moving in that straight line towards a fixed goal, then it’s not progress. In our case, I had a lot of song ideas and liked being the one to bring the primary idea to the table or being the progenitor of the song structures. I took up a lot of space.
Fortunately, I got a lot of feedback from everyone else. For Yvonne and Elise, Truth Club is the first band where they felt like they had room to express and develop their creative sensibilities. They wanted some room to do that, and it took a while. I think the fixed point that we were looking towards was this idyllic dynamic with all four of us contributing equally. We’ve achieved that and done those things, but something we’ve all realized is that we’re all very different people who do and feel so many different things at the same time.
What feels more dynamic than this idyllic “equitable approach” is being down to roll with the flow. Sometimes I’m totally at a loss for what to do, and Kameron or Yvonne will pick up the slack. Or sometimes everybody else has no ide,a but I do. That feels way more human and healthy. It’s okay to have fluidity in terms of who’s going to show up when. Somebody might not contribute as much one day, but that’s okay because other days they’ll create something amazing.
What are some of your goals for the rest of 2025 (and beyond)?
Travis: We’ve been working on a new record for a little while. What we’ve figured out about our collaboration has been working on this new album, and it has informed our perspective. Nothing ever happens the same way twice, but it’s hard not to have expectations of how something’s going to go based on your previous experience. So it’s been a bit more methodical, a bit slower going than our last record, and that’s okay.
There’s been difficulty with that, but it’s also been very rewarding to try and work through it. Like writing songs from a different angle. The goal is to finish that within the next couple of months. And then we just announced a tour supporting the band Pool Kids. That’s a full US tour in September. I don’t know if we’ll do much more touring this year before then, but that’ll be like a full month. It’ll be nice to see the whole country and play some of these new songs.
We also have three shows coming up at the end of July with this band called Ducks Ltd. We’re playing a show in Durham, then the Atlanta and Nashville dates.
Who are your favorite local/North Carolina bands?
Travis: Our good friend Max Gowan is one of the best songwriters I know. He makes incredibly smart music and does a lot of recording now. Charlie Paso is really fun, I love Nina and Duncan. Being a two-piece is really brave and I commend them for being so great.
I really like the band Saturnalias. Also Tombstone Poetry and Dish. There’s another band I saw play a couple of weeks ago at a friend’s house called bedrumor and they’re from Greensboro. They’re really great.
A really good friend of mine is in this band Exercise from Wilmington. He’s one of the most unique guitarists I’ve ever heard play, bar none, anywhere. That band is so frenetic and cool.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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