Bologna, 2016. Olivier Le Tohic is on his third day of a European tour as Harm Done‘s roadie. He’d recently quit a toxic job, burnt out and depressed. Two friends of his had just joined the band, who were heading out on tour with internal tensions and looking for someone to settle the mood. Olivier wasn’t part of the hardcore scene, was abusing drugs, didn’t have a driver’s licence. Frontman Alexis was notoriously Straight Edge. They picked him anyway. “A weird hippie wearing black clothes,” as he puts it.
Driving back from a tourist stop in the city toward that night’s venue, he tells the others he can see light coming from the trunk and that it isn’t normal. They laugh. Then they check. Every piece of clothing he’d brought on the tour, plus the drummer’s, was gone. To this day, no one knows how.
“Isn’t this supposed to be a Punk tour?” he answered when the band offered him a way out.
He stayed. The clothes never came back. The tour ended. He got “2016” tattooed on his leg. The following year he started Trainfantome.
That story is the underground arc behind “Constant Farewells“, Trainfantome’s third LP, out now via Howlin Banana, Flippin’ Freaks and Influenza Records. The band operate between Lorient and Nantes, deep in Brittany, and the project orbits around Olivier as singer, guitarist, and main songwriter. The new album is the darker, more direct counterpoint to 2023’s “THIRST”, and Olivier says it himself.
“If THIRST is my Nevermind, Constant Farewells is my In Utero.”
He’s been honest about why. “After putting out THIRST i’ve had a lingering feeling that i didn’t really achieve my goal on this album. The process was kinda harder than planned and I lacked a bit of experience at the time too, it was really frustrating. Retrospectively I think it’s part of the reason I chose that ‘cute’ cover too, I drenched it in cuteness and irony because the end product felt too ‘pop’ and synthetic. For this one I definitely wanted to balance that shininess out with a more radical proposition, something more raw and direct. Ultimately, my whole life took a dark turn so it wasn’t much of an effort anyway.”
Grief and new fatherhood pushed the record into a heavier register. “Constant Farewells” doesn’t sit comfortably inside shoegaze. The pop melodies are still there, the kind that catch on first listen, but Olivier wraps them in something colder and grimier than “THIRST” allowed. “rituals” tips into post-black metal territory.
“RED HERRING” wanders off into electronic experimentation. The lineage runs through Failure, My Bloody Valentine, Duster, Deafheaven and Nirvana, and the record settles into its own balance: melodies that catch, leaden weight underneath, a darkness that doesn’t feel performed. Alexis of Flippin’ Freaks once described “THIRST” as Heatmiser-era Elliott Smith meeting Deftones in a French gambling bar in Brittany. “Constant Farewells” trades the gambling bar for somewhere colder.
The guest list backs the new direction. Kellii Scott from Failure plays drums on “Here The Mermaids Play”, which closes a loop. Olivier names Failure among the bands he came up on. His friend Teenage Bed, the shoegaze band Clarence, and Terreur (an anonymous member of a known Nantes black metal band) trade vocal cameos across the rest of the record.
The “former hardcore kids who are starting to listen to softer or more varied stuff” line Olivier uses to describe the audience for “Constant Farewells” isn’t a marketing pitch. It maps to his own history.
“Well I grew up listening to lots of different things, The Beatles, Sade, Tears For Fears…the Backstreet Boys (hahaha) but also a lot of Metal, I was the right age when Nu-Metal was a thing…I feel really lucky for that. I was a soft and solitary kid so it’s only later in life that I’ve had the opportunity to share my love for countercultures and extreme music with the others, I was fascinated by the Hardcore-Punk scene but I was only a satellite. Now I’m friends with the people that inspired me all these years and it feels full-circle, i think about bands like Direwolves and Harm Done (for whom I was a roadie across Europe once and got my valizzi stolen).”
The Bologna trip wasn’t just a story he tells. He calls it one of the most defining experiences of his life. The band tested him constantly. Then came the stolen bag, the “Isn’t this supposed to be a Punk tour?” answer, and the moment things turned.
“The band told me that If I wanted to bail out from the tour it was completely ok, to which I answered ‘Isn’t this supposed to be a Punk tour?’, I guess that’s when they saw I was serious and I really became a part of the group that day. It was overall a great experience, the conversations in the van got really deep (at times), it was amazing to see them play in all these different places with the same exact devotion every time. At the end of the tour we weren’t strangers anymore and I felt that I fulfilled my mission despite being the underdog. Looking back now, it’s still one of the most pivotal experiences in my whole life, I understood what I was meant for and it gave me the confidence to pursue my dreams, then in 2017 I created Trainfantome, if you know what I mean. I even got ‘2016’ tattooed on my leg!”
The cross-genre instinct that runs through “Constant Farewells” comes out of the same place.
“My point of view is that it’s always more fun to mix things that, from the outside, feel like they don’t belong together, we are all complex blends of influences so it always ends up making sense when something is truly personal. In the end i think it’s the raw emotions that connect all of these styles, it’s the way to express them that differs on the surface.”
The album title carries its own meaning, and Olivier doesn’t hide it.
“When I think about it, I don’t create as much as I transform. Life is ever changing, that’s the true meaning behind the title ‘Constant Farewells’, about the impermanence of things. It’s a reminder to not get too attached to a specific vision of things, you should always be ready to change your mind, otherwise…you get old and then your soul slowly dies! haha Writing songs is my way of processing the things that come my way, when I need to take a step back, sometimes I read stuff I wrote years ago about something I realized lately and I’m like ‘I already knew’! You get the opportunity to shape your life experience in a way that feels more connected and real to your emotions. It’s a really powerful tool, I think.”
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“Constant Farewells” is available on vinyl from Howlin Banana’s Bandcamp, digitally on streaming, and on the band’s YouTube channel. Singles “Here The Mermaids Play” and “rituals” both have videos. A short run of release shows:
18/06: Lille @ La Malterie
19/06: Paris (Montreuil) @ Le Chinois / Soirée Mowno w/ Projector + Ile De Garde
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