“blood in the seams” is the final single Trueandtrue have released before their debut album. It’s also the first song they wrote for it. The Oslo four-piece put the track out on May 22 as the closing preview of “NOSEDIVE“, the album that lands on May 29 via New Bloom Records, and from the way vocalist and guitarist Vincent Engebretsen tells it, that one song set the template for everything else on the record.
The early Trueandtrue stuff was built on contrast, songs that swung between tension and release fast. La Dispute and mewithoutYou were sitting at the back of their minds as reference points when they started the band. “Bands that I think carry a really intense emotional weight without constantly needing to be chaotic,” Vincent says about those early touchstones. “A lot of our earlier songs were built around contrast, where songs would swing between tension and release pretty quickly.”
That shifted once they’d played enough shows and started writing toward the debut. The track they wrote first was the one nobody could stop talking about. “It felt like it was constantly on its way to falling apart,” Vincent says about “blood in the seams”. “And that became a pretty important reference point for the rest of the record.”
From there, the writing pushed toward moments that don’t resolve cleanly. “NOSEDIVE” came together chronologically, with “(i made this with nothing)” being the other exception alongside “blood in the seams”. That order shaped the pacing and emotional direction of the record. Each new track had to feel as intense as the last but get to the intensity from a different angle.
There’s a thread Vincent flags that doesn’t sit on the surface of the album’s stated themes of self-worth, belonging, grief, religion, and identity coming apart under pressure. A lot of “NOSEDIVE” came out of moments in the practice room that made the four of them laugh or shake their heads at how stupid something felt.
“That immediate reaction became very important,” he says. The humor doesn’t make it through fully into the finished arrangements, but it leaves traces in the lyrics and the way the music sits underneath them. “There’s a lot of tension in how something can feel almost absurd in one moment and then suddenly land in something very vulnerable in the next.”
Previous singles “prayin’ with the boys” and “the director’s cut” set up the band’s appetite for unpredictable shifts. Their two earlier EPs got coverage from Stereogum, Metal OBS, NRK P3, and Distorted Sound, and the most recent one, “This Won’t Last When You Know the Beginning”, pulled a 5/6 from Disharmoni.
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Trueandtreu are: Vincent Engebretsen (vocals/guitar), Simen Winje (guitar), Fabian Stordalen (bass), Gaute Falch (drums).
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