Truck Violence bets noise and folk can hold what political language cannot

The Montreal quartet Truck Violence built their second album the way they built their first: without outside money, a producer, or anyone who wasn’t already in the room. “The Weathervane Is My Body” is a self-produced record in the fullest sense — composed, recorded, mixed, and visually designed by the four people who perform it. What changed is the scale of what it is aimed at.

Nine tracks and 31 minutes address climate catastrophe, the spread of fascism in Western societies, and the erosion of personal identity inside systems that do not account for the individual. Noise rock, post-hardcore, folk, sludge, and bluegrass share space here not as genre exercises but as emotional registers: the same emergency expressed through different vocabularies.

Singer-poet Karsyn Henderson and guitarist-banjoist Paul Lecours grew up in a French Canadian town of 600 before relocating to Montreal, where they built out the band with bassist Chris Clegg and percussionist Thomas Hart. Their debut, “Violence,” released in 2024 on Southern Lord, earned an 8/10 from Pitchfork for what critics called a forceful rejection of stereotypes about prairie communities. “The Weathervane Is My Body” arrives on The Flenser and Mothland, two labels that know what to do with music that doesn’t fit in obvious places.

The record moves between suffocating and wistful without resolving the tension — that sustained refusal to settle is its structural argument. “Compelled by Christy” and “House Caught Fire” demonstrate the band’s central collision: loud without being triumphant, aggressive and earnest at the same time. The closing track, “Kindly, Wash Yourself,” gathers Midwest emo, folk, and hardcore into something that functions less as an ending than as a release of accumulated pressure.

Where the debut “Violence” rooted itself in the specifics of prairie dysfunction — addiction, abuse, the psychic weight of rural shame — this record expands the frame to address wider political catastrophe. The album title positions the body as the site where all of these forces land: weathered, pushed down, but still capable of orientation. In the band’s own framing, the record is “an attempt at conciliation through refusal” — a statement that clarifies the terms without softening them.

The limitations are real. Truck Violence’s reach remains decisively underground: no Spotify presence, fewer than 2,000 listeners on Last.fm at release, and a label ecosystem built for depth over scale. The album’s 31 minutes give almost no room for casual listeners, and track titles like “Stomach as a tower and the globules descending” signal a band writing for a specific listener, not the general browser. Whether an album about fascism and climate collapse earns a broader audience than their debut is not settled by the record’s ambitions alone.

The band has previously played SXSW, Roadburn, Roskilde, and the 2000trees Festival across North America and Europe. “The Weathervane Is My Body” is available now via The Flenser and Mothland, released June 26.

Tags: experimental, noise rock, post-hardcore, The weathervane is my body, truck violence