Getting to Know… TRANK | Interview 🎤

On our 226^th interview in our Getting to Know… series, we get awesome insight from eclectic French alt-rock band, TRANK.

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recently described our sound as the bastard child of Depeche Mode and Soundgarden, with Muse as midwife, Killing Joke as the chief anesthetist, and the guys from Porcupine Tree in charge of running the hospital.” Wow 😮 – what a colorful characterization 🎙 TRANK! Prior to that answer, the band asserts, “It’s usually hard for people to pin us down to one ‘style’, or to say ‘oh – you sound EXACTLY like so and so.’ We sound EXACTLY like no one else.” Rock on 🤘!!! The interviewees on our 226^th Q&A provide in-depth, compelling responses to our burning questions.  “That’s the way (uh-huh, uh-huh), we like it (uh-huh)”! So, without spoiling anymore of this excellent Q&A, why don’t you check out 🎤 Getting to Know… TRANK: Interview No. 226 for yourself!

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Starting things off, for those who may not be familiar with you, what would you say makes TRANK distinct or unique? How do you rock the audience’s socks off?

🎤 You’d have to ask the audiences that. We play what comes to us when we’re together and it naturally meshes into the TRANK sound. But as to what makes us unique – well, the first thing I’d mention is precisely the fact that it’s usually hard for people to pin us down to one “style”, or to say “oh – you sound EXACTLY like so and so.” We sound EXACTLY like no one else. That’s because what we do sits at the crossroads of so many genres – there’s a riff-driven alt-rock element to it, there’s a post-punk touch of darkness to it, there’s hints of 90’s metal, there’s harmonies and atmospheres, there’s something angry and emotional but it’s also very cerebral music in a way. And the other thing about our music is that it’s full of contrasts. We love contrasts. We love light and shade – within a song, and all along a concert set list or an album. We love that a song can be both catchy and complex, flamboyant and dark, powerful and perverted at the same time. So much music right now feels flat and one-dimensional, without any depth or nuance or layers to it, it makes listening to Spotify feel like walking down the frozen meat aisle in a supermarket. We’re very deliberately anti that.

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Okay, let’s explore some juicy backstories. How did TRANK form and what were some of the goals or the visions you had early on?

🎤 Nothing really juicy about how we got together, but what makes us unique is we’re starting the band at the age where most people stop theirs. We’ve all been lifelong music fans and collectors, and we’ve all had experiences in professional or semi pro bands before, but TRANK was the first project where the four of us went, “OK, what’s happening in the practice room is good enough that it WANTS to be treated like a professional project.”

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Let’s talk more about goals.  Have your goals or your perspectives changed since first starting out? What do your aspirations or goals look like now?

🎤 We’ve had the same vision since day one – although it was actually a couple of years into the project when we sat down and discussed it, just to make sure everyone was on the same page. Mostly it’s about creating a body of work that we can look back on with pride in 10 or 15 years from now, and say, “we’ve made the music we wanted to hear, and it meant something important enough people besides us that we have memories of great gigs to look back on as well.” None of that has changed. The challenge for us is – we’ve started the band later in life than most bands do. On the one hand it’s great, because it means there’s so much we can bring into the music – be it influences on the sound, or experiences and observations that will inspire the lyrics. On the other hand, it means we have families and jobs (yaaaaawn 😴), so we can’t very well be out gigging 350 nights a year to build up an audience the way a younger band would, can we? It puts even more pressure on making good songs, crafting them to perfection, doing the same with the visual aspect – videos and sleeves, all of that without a label. And, it means that we’ve gone for few, huge gigs, opening for well-established bands, rather than long headline tours of small venues. We haven’t been signed or even approached by a label, but we’ve had massively successful opening gigs in huge, packed full arenas for Deep Purple, Anthrax, Disturbed, and Papa Roach. Not many starting bands can say that.

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Everybody is influenced by somebody else. Who would you consider some of your biggest musical influences and how are they influential?

🎤 I recently described our sound as the bastard child of Depeche Mode and Soundgarden, with Muse as midwife, Killing Joke as the chief anesthetist, and the guys from Porcupine Tree in charge of running the hospital. I think that about sums it up. We all have hugely diverse, eclectic tastes, but those five would probably be the most obvious ones. We also get asked about The Cure, Radiohead, and Placebo, whom we also love, although the connection seems less audible to me. But hey – I’m only the singer.

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Ah, the fun stuff.  What’s your craziest tour story or the wackiest thing that’s happened during a performance?  Feel free to be creative.

🎤 The crazier good one must have been opening for Deep Purple. They were a total class act and behaved like big brothers to us. We were supposed to open for them in the Riga Arena (16,000 capacity). And the day before the gig, they put out a press release… ABOUT US, urging their fans to show up on time to catch our whole set because “if we started Deep Purple in the XXIst Century, we’d sound a lot like TRANK.” Which means that when we got on stage, the place was packed full of people with pretty high levels of anticipation… Fortunately for us, they loved every bit of it, and so did Purple, who – as we found out later – stood behind us during our own gig, watching from the stage. We were then allowed to do the same, and Steve Morse took the opportunity of a long keyboard solo by Don Airey to come and chat us up DURING the concert. Unreal.

The craziest bad moment was opening for Anthrax in Moscow. Their soundcheck took three times as long as planned – we were supposed to soundcheck for 45 minutes and finish 30 minutes before we started to play, instead of which we have a grand total of 12 minutes of sound check… IN FRONT of about 5,000 people, because security hadn’t been told everything was late and they let the pit ticket owners in. It could have turned into a proper disaster, but instead we made them participate: “can you hear this guy? And that guy? Louder? More?” It was good fun, we rushed off for 2 minutes to change, and when we came back to play they welcomed us like friends. They loved the show, too, so in the end it was a great moment – but it started out pretty nerve-wracking.

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Up until this point in your career, what would you describe as your favorite song you’ve recorded or performed live? What makes that song special?

🎤 You’re asking us to choose among our children. It’s not necessarily a favorite, but the one we ALWAYS open our sets with is 🎵 “In Troubled Times” – we play it with an extended intro that pushes its ceremonial, messianic aspect even further than the original, so it’s a very powerful way to start a concert. Some of our songs have that sort of gothic, solemn quality to them, and that one has it more than the others. 

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Is there anything else awesome, cool, or left of center the world should know about you? Secret talents or surprising tidbits?

🎤 Classified. Remember the part where “we have families”? We’d like to keep it that way.

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Closing things out, what is TRANK currently working on, promoting that you can share with us or want us to know about? We love secrets, but there’s no pressure. 

🎤 Well – we released our very first album, 💿 The Ropes, at the end of 2020, in the middle of lockdown. And despite that, it got dozens of unanimously rave reviews in the French media, and our little stock of old school CD’s ran out fast. Then we got noticed and picked up by a distributor, so now we’re re-releasing the album with proper on and off line distribution and promotion, and we’ve made it into an expanded deluxe edition with 12 very cool remixes in addition to the 12 original songs. There’s a video out there for one of the remixes (of 🎵 “In Troubled Times” – the concert opener I was mentioning earlier), and another one will come out sometime in December. For more news people can find us easily on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and the www.trankmusic.com website.

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Thank you so much for sharing taking the time to answer these questions, and best of luck moving forward. 

🎤 Thank you for asking them ;).

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🎤 Getting to Know… TRANK: Interview No. 226 [: TRANK, Brent Faulkner, Gabi Hirit, The Musical Hype]

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