Trust Punks

“We’re just keen to get it out there – out of my head and into somebody else’s!” says guitarist and vocalist Joseph Thomas. “We wrote a lot of the music quite a long time ago. We actually started recording this album before our first one [2014’s Discipline] had even come out.

“That’s kind of the reason we started recording again so quickly,” Thomas adds. “We had a feeling that our first LP wasn’t really going to turn out the way we wanted it to. I remember being kind of disappointed by those songs, so I thought that the only way to remedy that situation was to throw ourselves into whatever we were going to do next, and work really hard on these songs to make sure they were going to be as good as we could possibly make them. So we took our time with it as much as possible over a number of months – that turned out to be a couple of years – to make sure we were going to be perfectly happy with this release.”

Double Bind may only be the New Zealand five-piece’s second attempt at a full studio album, but it’s certainly not light on the integrity, conviction and insight that many other young bands seem to lack. ‘Good Luck With That’, the third single from the album, reveals Trust Punks’ unabashed opinion on the state of the American prison system, while ‘Paradise/Angel-Wire’ offers a much-needed critique of the failing policies surrounding Australian immigration.

Thomas relocated to Sydney in 2015, and in light of our recent election debacle, I ask what he thinks about living in a country and being unable to vote. “I didn’t even know it was happening until the day before,” he admits. “But on a really basic level, it kind of sucks that I couldn’t vote – but I also have the freedom of being able to leave this place literally whenever I want.

“What really sucks is that refugees face mandatory detention and neither of the major parties here really seem to want to put an end to it. And I don’t think me not having voted would change anything anyway.”

Their latest single ‘The Reservoir’, which focuses on feelings of disillusionment and the anxiety of being perceived as different by society, was one of the tracks Thomas worked on as he settled in to life in Australia. “I recorded the guitars just after I arrived in Sydney, so I sent it to the guys in Auckland and they just threw it all together,” he explains.

Like Discipline before it, Double Bind will also be released on vinyl – arguably the only way to hear the jangly guitars, left-of-centre melodies and level of distortion the way Trust Punks intended them to be heard.

“It’s my favourite way to listen to music and I think it sounds better, so it just makes sense to me to have our music available on that format,” says Thomas. “Also, it keeps some level of independent music afloat, in a sense. I really value the idea of an independent record store as a hub for people of different ages and backgrounds, ideally to meet, discuss and exchange ideas. I think that without LPs they wouldn’t necessarily be around. So it’s good to support local independent stores, because if we don’t, we may risk having them fall by the wayside and people will be reduced to listening to music through a screen.”

Trust Punks are a breath of fresh air on the indie scene, but that doesn’t stop them being compared to other post-punk luminaries from the past and present, such as Fugazi, Deerhunter and more recently the outspoken Canadian band Preoccupations, formerly known as Viet Cong.

“I like most of the bands we get compared to, so it doesn’t really bother me that much,” Thomas says. “But if they were comparing us with stuff that I didn’t listen to or didn’t think was very good, or I didn’t feel that we really related to in any way, it would probably bother me. But I understand that we’re a new band and there is a need to compare us to others. The bands that we get compared to are bands we listened to in high school, so I don’t sweat too much about it.”

To celebrate their second release, Trust Punks will kick off an east coast tour in Brisbane this week, before heading to Sydney to play Marrickville’s Cosmo’s Rock Lounge on Friday night. Make sure you catch them while you can – because according to Thomas, the future is uncertain.

“After the Australian shows we will probably play some shows at home in New Zealand, and we’ve been talking about maybe going to Japan for a bit too. That would be sick if we could make that happen, but I honestly don’t really know what the future holds. We haven’t talked about it too much, but that’s probably something we have to do in the tour van. I haven’t even seen those guys for quite a long time, so once we’re all in the same room together, we will have to work it out.

“We may be recording another album before the end of the year. Or we could be broken up. I don’t really know.”