For California-based indie rock/emo-Americana act Trebuchet, their upcoming second effort Volte-Face looks to be a deeper — and darker — delve into the psyche of lyricist Eliott Whitehurst and the drastic changes he’s gone through in recent years. First single and album opener “A Confession” gives a little taste of just how that’s going to affect the sound of the foursome, and we are excited to premiere the track this afternoon on Vanyaland.
“One of the things that came up over and over for me in the writing process for this album was the theme of complacency,” Whitehurst says. “Over the last few years, I’ve found myself in some pretty difficult and painful positions as a result of indecision and not really wanting to commit to a specific path. I think that writing ‘A Confession’ was kind of a wakeup call that I placed to myself. It’s no new trope: the fear of waking up one day to realize that you’ve lived half your life and you aren’t anywhere that you ever wanted to be. Writing this album and putting everything that all four of us had into it was the clear direction that we wanted to go, and hopefully that’s apparent through what we’ve produced.”
Sophomore endeavors are always a daunting prospect to begin with; do you stay with the sound that drew fans in in the first place, or start coloring outside of the sonic lines? Trebuchet recorded Volte-Face in their home studio, which resulted in a different path, evident on “A Confession,” which Whitehurst says, “marks a departure from the sound of our previous releases.”
“Recording ourselves in our own studio this time around allowed us to take as much time as we wanted when working our way through the process,” he says. “This being one of the first songs that we completed off of our upcoming release, it’s apparent that we wanted to move in a heavier direction than we’d gone in the past. Vocal harmonies remain the cornerstone of our songs, but we’re excited for the music to more closely mirror the tone of our lyrical content.”
While we await the release of Volte-Face, due next year, Trebuchet will officially issue “A Confession” December 11 at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. Listen to it below.