With Trans Am just about to kick off a European tour that has cruelly ignored Ireland, we’ll have to make do with the video for their song ‘Insufficiently Breathless’ with some delicate guitar lines and wandering synths. Enjoy…

 

Volume X, the title of the new album by Trans Am (the band’s tenth studio release!) comprises of ten songs that display ten unique sides of Phil Manley, Nathan Means and Sebastian Thomson. You can also imagine a volume knob being cranked all the way up, the amplification level for an ideal Trans Am listening session. But it can also be read as a representation of the band’s remarkable ability to express and even embody, unknown capacities, adopting bold stylistic and aesthetic shifts as a defining tenet of their quarter-century long career. Trans Am refuse to rely on their legacy as innovators, opting instead to continue to break down established modes of songwriting even if they established those modes themselves. Volume X continues in this gloriously contrarian tradition presenting fans with strange and familiar sounds in new contexts, from kosmische rock to futuristic speed metal to robo-balladry to variants on classic rock that are so warped as to be rendered completely unrecognizable.

Volume X was recorded in spurts over three years, mostly at LCR Studios in San Francisco, where Phil Manley has recorded many other bands (Wooden Shjips, Les Savy Fav, Moon Duo The F**king Champs etc) as a professional engineer. He also plays in Life Coach with Jon Theodore of Queens of the Stone Age, and Thomson spends his time away from Trans Am playing drums for Baroness. The band is continues to live in separate cities, although all three have settled within the continental US for now.