Trash Kit are Rachel Aggs (guitar, vocals), Rachel Horwood (drums, vocals) and Gill Partington (bass). Three deeply creative individuals who play in a multitude of other groups including Bas Jan, Sacred Paws, Shopping and Bamboo, united by a shared decade of spry musicality that surges through their bodies, hearts and heads with Trash Kit. Their songs once succinct, patchwork post-punk numbers of an honest diary-like nature now tussle more with long-form songwriting, expeditious polyphony and cascades of sung-spoke vocals. This new focus began with their last album ‘Confidence’ (2014) and has now grown into something exhilarating and rapturous. New songs like ‘Disco’ have had their very fabric stretched into smart new shapes, allowing the band to run away with refrains and unlock the dancefloor. Although Trash Kit have their forebears in bands like Sleater Kinney, The Ex and The Raincoats, their sound is still very much their own take on facing forwards and relies as much on the naturalism of an internalised folk music as on their sincerity of vision. Since forming in 2009, Trash Kit have released two albums for Upset The Rhythm and a selection of singles, this July however they make their most majestic move yet with their resoundingly huge Horizon album. For this album, carefully crafted through years of playing out live, the band have chased down the distance between what they wanted the record to sound like and its realisation. They’ve augmented these songs with choral arrangements, piano, saxophone, harp, viola and cello. Pulling ideas from everywhere between the earth and sky, to push themselves further, to go beyond. Aggs' guitar playing for this album was informed by her love of guitar music from Zimbabwe, her cyclical motifs billow with lean Mbira rhythms. Horwood has similarly approached her drumkit with an untamable freedom, allowing it to breathe as a vivid lead instrument. Trash Kit's music is woven with silence and punctuation, and this is where the resonant, driving bass of Partington fits in. The bass has become now central to shaping the melody of this new collection of songs. Lyrically the album has edged into an exemplary construct of the personal politic and the profound, quiet, almost unnoticed observations that we all make through each day without realising their true significance. Horizon finds itself abrim with themes, especially the notion of looking to the future, “personally as well as to the future of the band, the future of marginalised people making music, political futures, trying to imagine and re-imagine our world, thinking about what possibility and change sound like” attests Aggs. ‘Coasting’ which opens the album is concerned with “the end of the world and also the afterlife” and was written after Aggs read ‘The Parable of the Sower’ by the Afro futurist sci-fi writer Octavia Butler, a novel set in an apocalyptic California and featuring a protagonist in search of change and renewal. “When all this ends, without warning, where will we be?” sing Horwood and Aggs in robust unison. ‘Sunset’ draws on similar themes of ending and salvation, and proves equally ruminative. ‘Dislocate’ on the other hand is an upbeat sprint of spinning guitar and piano riffs showcasing both Rachels’ overlapping vocal magnetism.

Lithe, dance-worthy post punk that matches spiraling, cyclical guitar lines to free-flowing but disciplined rhythms, with additional saxophone, piano and stringed instruments fleshing out a sound reminiscent of Raincoats or mid-period Talking Heads...

By Adam