Troldhaugen’s off-kilter, one-of-a-kind music often eludes categorisation, even for the band members.
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“I wouldn’t know where to begin – maybe silly metal?” guitarist Matthew Bell joked of their wacky folk-prog-circus-metal hybrid.
The Wollongong quartet’s new album, and third overall, Idio+Syncrasies, is due for release on September 1.
Bell said their approach to creating such genre-bending fare had changed somewhat recently.
“Traditionally, and actually most of the way into this album even I’ll write some demos, get together with the guys and see what sticks.
“But now it’s getting to the point where we’ll just throw out dumb ideas, either conceptually in terms of a song or in terms of a music idea.
“And we’ll just all kind of gravitate towards… like, ‘yeah, that’s so stupid, we have to do that’.
“That’s kind of becoming the base for our songs now… Something that makes all of us go, ‘oh wow, that’s such a bizarre idea we have to try it’.”
Troldhaugen reached their crowdfunding target for the new album in less than 24 hours.
The album’s first single, BMX Terminator, features a suitably off-beat lyric video.
“It’s weird, because it’s heavy, and it’s definitely not not a metal song, but there’s no real aggression or anger or anything,” he said. “It’s like sonically heavy, but the content is so light-hearted that I don’t even know if I would classify it as metal.”
The band previously enjoyed triple j airplay for single Viva Loa Vegas, which Bell believed had helped broaden their following.
“Almost immediately we saw a lot less of a metal fan-base,” he said.
“That was really different for us, because up until that point we’d always just played to like the usual crowd.
“All of a sudden we were getting people that a) we don’t know, and b) are from a completely different scene.
“So it’s made it a lot more diversified, which is cool.”
Troldhaugen toured Europe with Scottish band Alestorm in 2014, and played Germany’s prestigious Summer Breeze festival in 2015.
After a brief run of shows in NSW and the ACT, they’ll return to Europe in late September/October.
“One of our strengths is as a live band, especially because (front-man) Jariss is so captivating that it can catch people off-guard,” Bell said.
Troldhaugen performs at Wollongong UniBar on September 16.
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