Comprised of songwriting duo Walter Sunrise and Nile Rivers, with Owen Ashley on drums, Truant Kids is a Kansas-based alternative pop band who are empowered with a playful art-school exuberance.
Embracing an experimental edge and penchant for evolving rhythms and abstract lyrics, Truant Kids’ hook-filled music can pull a subtle sleight of hand magic trick to reveal a nostalgic sting in the heart.
Written and produced by childhood friends Sunrise and Rivers, the track ‘Golden Earrings’ is the 7-minute centrepiece of the band’s second album Heart, released in December 2023, which followed on the heels of their self-titled debut album from a year before.
Starting with clean waves of post-rave synths, a drum beat kicks in which serves as the track’s progressive pulse. Vocal harmonies follow, before being joined by the wonderfully mournful lead vocals, which shares echoes of David Byrne’s emotional wail or Bryan Ferry performing at an empty disco with his seductive croon bouncing off the walls.
When a gloriously funky guitar line enters the frame, it becomes clear that this song is a journey across a changing bed of emotions and shifting movements. Led by catchy bass and lead guitar, in tandem with progressive percussion arrangements, Golden Earrings blossoms into a mid-tempo Talking Heads groover, complete with splendid jam trance and vocal chant circle.
Beginning with the lyrics, ‘How do I pick up love / My thumbs, they’re mincemeat / No more hugs from you / Golden Earrings,’ it appears the golden earrings of the song is a symbolic reminder of a past relationship, where only the regret of ‘silver rings’ and ‘letters that you left’ remain.
This sense of longing for love haunts the track and threatens to grow into frustration. Fantastically oblique lyrical fragments tell a tale of going to Timbuktu and an existence where you ‘gotta break, some rules and run’.
When the extended jam section arrives, the call of ‘Trying to precipitate / The storm that never comes,’ develops into a mantra, a cry out for closure, a desire to escape from certain situations (‘Hide, gotta hide, and get more food’) that may never be possible.
After a reverie of an outro, Golden Earrings ends as it begins, with a reprise of the opening wavering synths – perhaps hinting at the circular nature of longing and loss and the scars of absence can leave.
As a window into Truant Kids’ album Heart, Golden Earrings is something of a sonic outlier – an island cast against a sea of glossy indie productions with their hearts indebted to the new wave and jangle pop scenes of the 80s.
Across Heart’s 16 tracks, Truant Kids showcase their evolution in sound via a variety of vibrant guitar and synth passages interplaying with a range of vocal styles. The sonic ancestry of Golden Earrings can be traced back to the Animal Collective freak folk closer ‘Bohemian Sun’ found on their self-titled album.
Whether taking Tame Impala’s psychedelic pop sheen by way of MGMT and mixing it with experimental instrumentation as heard on ‘The Secret Garden of Abdul Gasazi’ or channelling the Strokes on ‘Civil Song’ and the Smiths on ‘Personality Hall’, the album highlights the bands knack for taking an assortment of influences and filtering them through their own heartache and songwriting lens.
Golden Earrings appears on the MEANS compilation album Living Within Our Means Vol 1:
https://meansmag.bandcamp.com/album/living-within-our-means-vol-1
You can listen and support Truant Kids’ back catalogue, which includes their two albums as well as a number on EPs, on their Bandcamp:
https://truantkids.bandcamp.com/music
Ryan Hooper
MEANS 