What does it mean to be human? For me, the answer is Royal Trux.

And I don’t mean that in the sense of being relatable, warm, decent or any other of the adjectives commonly thrown around when we talk about human qualities.

Royal Trux - a now defunct US rock group that consisted of Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema - might be lovely people, an utter joy to be around. But this, frankly, doesn’t come across in the music. 

There are doubtlessly people who can relate to their tale of clawing their way back from rampant drug addiction to sign a lucrative major label contract in the post-Nirvana era, upon which they released an album of abstract 70s rock noodle and tortured synths, the cover of which shows a blocked toilet, effectively forcing their label to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars to go away. But I’m not one of them.

What I mean by being human, in this case, is having a rampant, unpredictable creativity that doesn’t conform to any logical ideas of what music - and a musical career - should be like. I feel bad about dragging everything down to AI but there is no way an AI could have spat out Royal Trux, however much it might study the band’s apparent influences - let’s say The Rolling Stones, Funkadelic, AC/ DC and Captain Beefheart, although that doesn’t really cover it.

There’s no sense to the Royal Trux catalogue, no lineal development or logical steps and that makes it fantastically, refreshingly human. Royal Trux went from album to album the way most of us go about our lives: with only the vaguest of plans, stumbling from here to there as the winds buffer and take us, sometimes succeeding, sometimes falling flat on our faces.

To recap: the band’s 1988 eponymous debut is a ramshackle take on Southern rock boogie, permanently on the edge of collapse, with “literally no production”, according to Herrema, and the slightest suggestion of wonderful tunes hiding somewhere just beyond the chaos.

They followed that two years later with Twin Infinitives, a record that genuinely challenges the notion of what rock and roll might be, a mixture of effects, distorted guitars, drum machines and tantalising half melodies. 

Much like Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, one of the few records in rock history to which Twin Infinitives bears even a passing resemblance, the album sounds totally random but was apparently planned down to the note by Hagerty, which makes you wonder what the hell was going through his mind. Twin Infinitives is the kind of record you absolutely never want to listen to, until one day it’s the only record that will do.

By comparison - and by comparison only - the band’s untitled third album is almost conventional. Part of this is down to the circumstances of its recording. While the duo recorded Twin Infinitives over 18 months in a San Francisco warehouse, the band’s third album was laid down in one day in an $8 an hour studio in Maryland. “There was no sitting back and listening to it; it was straight up, like, here are the songs, whereas Twin Infinitives took over a year and a half,” Herrema told Vice in 2017.

A bad thing? Maybe for them. But what emerged (and I do mean “emerged”) from these reduced circumstances was Royal Trux’s brilliant songwriting - Junkie Nurse is like The Rolling Stones with the desperation turned way up - and the fact that Herrema has one of the most devastatingly unique voices in music, a gluey, sandy, phlegmy rock drawl, both laconic and ferocious. (See, for example, Sometimes.)

1993’s Cats and Dogs is often seen as Royal Trux’s masterpiece, representing the perfect balance between the band’s avant tendencies and their guitar-heavy songwriting, before more conceptual tinkering set in. 

As Herrema put it, in Vice: “It was more palatable, generically speaking, to a normal listening audience, whereas the first album was so barebones and lo-fi, we sounded like retarded people. Then Twin Infinitives was so dense and crazy. People didn’t know whether to take us seriously at all. With Cats and Dogs, we showed we could work on many different levels and contexts. I guess people figured out that maybe we were more than just retarded, drug people.”

Of course, this is Royal Trux we are dealing with, so don’t expect some kind of shiny, post-Nevermind pop grunge business. Yes, there are tunes that verge on the conventional - The Flag say, or Let’s Get Lost - but the phantom of chaos seems forever lurking in the wings, with the album’s very best song - The Spectre - nothing other than a detuned and highly sinister bongo jam.

The band followed this in relatively quick succession (or I think they did, anyway, the timing is a little hard to work out) with two of my favourite singles: Chairman Blow / Signed, Confused a seven-inch for the short-lived Electro Magnetic International; and Back to School / Cleveland for Drag City, with the two releases being combined on the Dogs of Love EP, released in the UK by Domino in 1993.

For whatever reason Dogs of Love was one of the first Royal Trux records I heard and it remains one of my favourites. Back To School is a superbly relaxed rock jam, with a loping bass line and nonchalant percussion, that perfectly captures that late-summer / schools coming vibe, while Chairman Blow is an abrasive rock anthem on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I’m not going to go into all the band’s various EPs here but the 1997 compilation Singles, Live, Unreleased does an excellent job in rounding them up.

It is a mark of how crazy the music industry was in the mid 90s - and how little the various executives understood both the rock underground and Royal Trux themselves - that the duo signed with Virgin in the middle of the decade, with the deal giving Royal Trux real, actual control to continue doing whatever the hell they wanted to.

This, as you might imagine, didn’t turn out as Virgin envisaged it, even if the first record released under the deal, 1995’s Thank You, was probably the closest the band ever got to sounding orthodox. It’s the only record that the duo employed an external producer for - David Briggs - and they rehearsed the songs intensely before recording them live.

It is perhaps for this reason that many Royal Trux fans dislike Thank You. But it was the first Royal Trux album I heard and, perhaps precisely for this reason, it remains my favourite. The record was apparently intended as the first part of the trilogy of albums exploring the music of the 60s, 70s and 80s but it sounds more early 1970s to me and in particular like The Rolling Stones circa. Exile on Main Street - an album Hagerty’s pre-Royal Trux band Pussy Galore once covered in its entirety.

Because, yes, freed temporarily form their ultra-lo-fi production roots Royal Trux do sound like a band aware of rock and roll convention; but they also sound powerful and funky and all-conquering; and if they had never made a record like this, I would have always wondered if they could have done so. Plus, I don’t think Herrema has ever sounded in better voice than on Thank You, with You’re Gonna Lose being a masterclass in rock attitude, to rank up there with the best of Iggy Pop’s work.

Sweet Sixteen, which followed in 1997, was the band’s 1970s album, recorded at glorious leisure in the band’s new Virginia ranch / studio, rich with the best musical gear that Virgin’s contract could afford them. The funny thing about Sweet Sixteen is that the elements of the 19780s that the band chose to focus on - glam, boogie, prog, P-funk and more - could actually be pretty commercial but not in the shapes that Royal Trux subjected them to. 

Virgin’s response - “There are way too many notes, the songs are too long and nobody can roller skate to it,” according to Herrema - capture the shape of the record without understanding its essence. There are too many notes and the songs may be a little long but this density is precisely Sweet Sixteen’s charm, an album that bristles with ideas and creativity. Oh and you can definitely roller skate to it. 

Still, Royal Trux put an overflowing toilet on the album’s cover, as their contract allowed them to, and Virgin bought them out of the contract. Job done.

Accelerator, the band’s seventh album, is perhaps the perfect example of how Royal Trux’s brilliant bloodymindedness made them so different. The record was meant to be the band’s 80s album, the antithesis of Sweet Sixteen: “shorter, simpler songs that were more pop-oriented and would fit on the radio” according to Herrema.

And maybe it might have been, had the duo not got their hands on a Spectrum Analyzer, a device that was intended to turn punky ramblings into punchy pop songs. “We wanted to record it where we took off the bottom-bottom and the hi-hi, which is why every track ran through a compressor,” Herrema explained to Vice. “We EQ’d everything the exact same way, where we cut the extreme highs and lows in that middle, radio-friendly band.”

Whether the Spectrum Analyzer didn’t work or - as I suspect - the band pushed it way too hard, the results on Accelerator were nothing like the kind of thing you would hear on the radio, either in 1998, when it was released, or in the 80s or ever, really. The record sounds crammed into the ear drums, vaguely distorted and off, in a way it is hard it put your finger on. 

Which is, in one way, a shame as Royal Trux pack some of their catchiest songs onto Accelerator - I’m Ready, The Banana Question, Juicy Juicy Juice et al. But would you really want it any other way? And then, right at the end, they appear to turn off the Spectrum Analyzer for the surprisingly lush Stevie (Song for Steven S.) and it is one of their greatest songs. Because of course they do.

1999’s Veterans of Disorder, the band’s eight record, was apparently envisaged as a singles collection, with the duo exploring the various facets of their personality over 10 rather disparate tracks. So Lunch Money and ¡Yo Se¡ sound conceived in the radical spirit of Twin Infinitives, Blue Is The Frequency is a spacial rock jam and Waterpark - one of my very favourite Royal Trux songs - is a swaggering heavy blues rock number that would have fit like a glove on Thank You.

Pound For Pound, which would be the last record of Royal Trux Phase One, is perhaps the record of theirs I have least listen to and I don’t quite know why. In some ways, Pound For Pound is like a sister record to Thank You, a vaguely conventional boogie rock record that sounds like a band having a wild time out in the studio. “We were definitely trying to edit things and distill it into what you’re talking about, but without losing the wild, weedy side,” Herrema explained to Vice. 

In this sense, the record certainly works - but for me Pound For Pound sounds like Thank You minus the golden childhood memories and with Herrema’s vocal dialled down 10%. Which makes it feel a little unnecessary, somehow, although Herrema rated it as the band’s best album in 2017.

Royal Trux split on the Pound For Pound tour, as Herrema and Hagerty’s romantic relationship dissolved and the singer went off the rails. But they reunited in 2015 for live shows and an album, White Stuff, followed in 2017, a record that was certainly better than Hagerty thought it was (he told The Guardian that he had heard “10 seconds of one song” and he didn’t approve) if not a vital addition to their catalogue. 

The record does, however, do a favour to the world by bringing in Kool Keith to collaborate on Get Used To This, a perfectly simpatico meeting of outrageous music minds that seems obvious when mentioned.

Is this the last we will see of Royal Trux? I suspect not. But who, really can tell? Reflecting on the band’s legacy in a 2012 interview with Pitchfork, Hagerty said the Royal Trux “had a plan and we stuck to it”. 

“It worked for a while and then drugs broke the band up,” he added. “We could have gone on indefinitely and I guess we would have caught up to the times eventually and had a hit or something, but it was not to be.”

They could, really, have done anything. And that was a vital part of the Royal Trux lore. The band were always weird and wonderful, dependably undependable, musical adventurers who seemed to hold rock and roll in as much scorn as they did awe. And they were human, right to the end, in triumph and failure, in all their sympathetically messed up glory.

Some listening

Tarta Relena - Mille Risposte (Dopplereffekt Isotopic Filter Re Structure)

Tarta Relena x Dopplereffekt is the party nobody was expecting to be a banger, the hook up no one knew they needed. I suppose we’ve reached the stage where Catalan duo Tarta Relena might do anything, from medieval folk pop to Georgian dancehall, but getting in Detroit legend Gerald Donald and To-Nhan Le Thi to lay a menacing electro-ish beat and cosmic synth waves below their classically-inclined vocals is a definite left-field triumph, which shows how incredibly, brilliantly malleable Tarta Relena’s work can be.

… And, hey, double Doppler! Because Dopplereffekt themselves announced a new record this week, the Metasymmetry EP, which is, surprisingly, their first ever EP for Tresor. The lead track Collapse of Simultaneity is simultaneously cosmic and moody, like a really horrible anti-gravity headache just outside Saturn.

Noname - Hundred Acres (feat. Devin Morrison)

The first new music from Noname in a couple of years is a low-key heater that angles around a nasty piano riff, the kind of piano that cares not a bit if it sounds like it was recorded on a child’s play-time keyboard because it is so damn addictive and funky, like ODB’s Shimmy Shimmy Ya in an old brushed velvet suit. Noname’s flow is delicious, a raging half swerve of internal rhyme and sharp humour - see “If this the last supper, then my lover gettin' three plates / Liberate a free state, communism sweepstakes” - while Devin Morrison supplies a hook that is far sweeter than that piano deserves.

h.pruz - After Always

A brushed snare drum, close-mic’d vocals and spider web acoustic guitars: After Always by New York’s Hannah Pruzinsky might just be the sound of autumn itself, all creeping darkness and the soft pull of melancholia, a raging fire of emotion being barely repressed.

Sarathy Korwar - We Take Things For Granted

It feels almost criminal to highlight one song from Sarathy Korwar’s ultra-enveloping new album There is Beauty, There Already, like snatching a young lamb from its flock and forcing it to justify the existence of sheep. 

The album is a 40-minute dive into rolling percussion, jazz, Indian instrumentation and electronic drone that cleans the over-worked brain like a cold walk in the woods, an entirely charming musical experience that you wish would last forever. (That there is a track on the album called “Every Day is a Cycle of Drum beats” seems to say it all.)

And yet highlight one song we must. And We Take Things For Granted is a three-minute capsule of all that is great about There is Beauty, There Already, its subtle suggestion of vocals giving the record a suitably haunting edge.

nose noise - Corn god energy

AKA what Superorganism’s Orono did next. Corn god energy, from her new band nose noise’s debut album TOM, doesn’t sound like Suerporganism, exactly - although god knows there’s nothing wrong with that. But it does have something of the band’s laid-back-to-the-point-of-horizontal invention, as if this charmingly unusual mixture of folk strum, Autotuned vocal and grunge-indebted melody - like Dinosaur Jr. on very strong cough mixture - is as natural as the birds in a tree on a summer day.

Things I’ve done

One-Minute Review - Rosalía’s Lux

Rosalía’s Lux will not explode your head or make phantoms appear in your ears. And maybe that doesn’t matter. That’s my view, anyway, of an album that is simultaneously one of the best of the year and ever so slightly disappointing. (On a first impression, anyway.) And you can hear me explain more in this new One-Minute Review.

ALL you NEED TO KNOW about PRIMAVERA SOUND PORTO's 2026 line up

AKA I spoke Primavera Sound bookers Abel Gonzalez and Pau Cristòful from the festival’s booking team about what to look forward to in PS Porto next year, the unique appeal of the festival’s Portuguese leg, the exclusive acts playing in Porto and some of the local (and Brazilian) acts playing in 2026.

Line Noise podcast - With Paul Kalkbrenner

In which I spoke to techno titan Paul Kalkbrenner about why The Essence is his best album - and the first to feature no filler - the wonky dance productions of the 90s, playing to half a million people, Depeche Mode, melancholia, Stromae and why he will never play Mein Freund Onze live. 

Things other people have done

Sonic Groove podcast - Adam X meets “Mad” Mike Banks 

Look, I know I am not good enough at showcasing all the excellent journalism that other people do in this newsletter and I apologise for it. But I really have to mention this, an hour-long interview with “Mad” Mike Banks, the co-founder of Underground Resistance and a techno legend, which was published this summer but I only found out about last week. If you can anything about techno, go and listen to it. Includes the brilliant line: “Rich boys don't make dance music, regular folks do.” Say it Mike!!!

The Playlists

Available via Apple Music: The newest and the bestest and The newest and bestest 2025.

And Spotify (for the moment): The newest and bestest 2025 and The newest and the bestest.

Paid subscribers get bonus podcasts, you know.