“The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.” This phrase by William Blake, taken from the “Proverbs of Hell” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, can be seen as an invitation to step back from ourselves and our ambitions. A warning that brings to mind the story of Tramhaus. With the release of their second album, Blister, the five musicians from Rotterdam seem to have digested their meteoric rise in a way Blake would probably not have disapproved of. In Blake, these proverbs are presented as teachings of the devil: those who chase their next fix will end up burning their wings. The constraints of life on the road, dictated by schedules and often exhausting, permeate all of Blister. You can hear it notably in the pulse that runs through “Lap Dog” from start to finish. The constant pressure of time and other people’s expectations also resonates in the lyrics, when singer Lukas Jansen declares: “For the longest time, I followed hearts,” before concluding a few lines later: “I’ll just agree on everything, to get along.” But Tramhaus is a band capable of facing what it goes through by relying on its cohesion. Its band spirit and the “glocal” network of friendships built over the past five years have allowed it to keep up with an almost permanent touring schedule while giving birth to a record that goes beyond the promise of its first album, The First Exit (2024). A collective, almost physical patience permeates this new record. The queues, the refusals at the door, the soundchecks, the lonely hotel rooms… The First Exit was a constant emotional discharge, the exalted soundtrack to a succession of emergencies. But it still relied on a horizon narrower than the one on Blister. Tramhaus is not a band that writes on the road. Tours are often too stressful to manage to capture what will end up on record. Ideas do emerge during soundchecks or while watching the endless procession of other bands. But the songs are never fully finished before entering the studio. Everything keeps being adjusted until the last moment, until the music really starts to circulate. As guitarist Micha Zaat sums it up: “It's a living thing.” This new album was recorded at GAM Studio, in the forest of the Belgian Ardennes, once again with Floyd Atema in charge of direction and production. Isolated from the world, the studio offered the band a real breather. Long walks in the forest, improvised matches in the garden… The band felt “outside the normal world.” Powerful, loud and assertive, Blister reveals all its richness over repeated listens. The record exudes real confidence. The production is spacious and elegant, with a strong sense of space and power. This is partly due to more refined sound work, attentive to the many nuances of the mids. Micha Zaat explains: “The studio gave us the opportunity to experiment with high-end gear, which suited this new album well, since we were looking for a richer, more textured sound.” Atema, particularly involved, pushed the band to its limits to get certain details that sometimes escaped musicians worn down by repeated takes. For the band, Atema is the true sixth member of Tramhaus. On to the songs. The vertigo of the last eighteen months spent on the road is already reflected in the opening track, “Plovdiv,” named after a Bulgarian city where the band played. The glam groove driven by drummer Jim Luijten and bassist Julia Vroegh propels a series of menacing riffs, over which shouted or screamed vocal lines land, evoking time slipping away or launching proclamations such as: “Trust is the guide, blindly I’ll follow.” Quoting lyrics evoking temporal confusion may seem paradoxical when claiming that Tramhaus, reinvigorated by this woodland interlude, has developed a very concrete sense of space and time in its music. Yet this ability to balance and expand its palette is immediately apparent on this record, and is in fact one of its central elements. On “Cluster,” for example, the metallic, percussive sound of one guitar contrasts beautifully with the moan of the other. A mix of atonality and melody. A piece of alchemy that leaves the song all the space it needs to breathe, something the first album had not yet fully managed to express. The next track, “The Answer?,” a song of exile and refuge, pits a twangy riff against aggressive rhythmic surges and a nervous bassline. This dramatic tension arises precisely from that contrast. Zaat’s frenetic guitar playing clashes with Nadya van Osnabrugge’s jagged riffs, creating a constant sense of instability. The dialogue between Micha Zaat’s and Nadya van Osnabrugge’s guitars works like a dance, where each musician physically responds to the other’s movements. This symbiosis feels natural, with no roles truly defined in advance. Yet both have very different styles and backgrounds. But each readily pushes experimentation, both in sounds and in arrangements. Imagination plays a central role in their approach. Speaking about “Cluster,” Zaat explains that he feels his part is like “ploughing thick earth while Nadya floats above like a fairy, giving the whole song an almost Sisyphean dimension, a tension between endless despair and hope.” The slower songs sometimes reveal a rock grandeur the band had only previously hinted at, bringing to mind Pixies, or perhaps, why not, a distant echo of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. In this sense, “Overachiever, Big Believer” and “Sly (Like Ever)” blend roughness with meticulously constructed melodic lines. Further on, “Solace,” with its open chords, displays a confidence that could come from a Saints song. Jansen’s dreamy and deliciously laid-back voice adds a enveloping softness. After the introspection of the short sonic piece “Recoil,” Tramhaus returns to the sound with which it is currently blowing rooms apart: “Rat Race” races headlong through a series of brief, sharp and sometimes enigmatic observations. Once again, the guitar textures are crafted with precision to produce maximum impact. Initially held in a cold tension, they explode in the momentum of the chorus. The song’s abrupt ending only reinforces its power. Tramhaus clearly has a rare talent for taking a riff to its full potential. The high point comes with “Swarm.” After a monolithic bass rumble, a glorious riff crashes down on the listener. A song that is both hymnic and transcendent, the kind of track that would have been a guaranteed hit in another era, pushing teenagers around the world to play air guitar in front of the mirror in their parents’ bedroom. You wish it lasted twice as long. And to awkwardly twist another phrase from Blake: Tramhaus, play that song again. - Richard James Foster