TR/ST

A wave could scarcely rise from the depths of contemporary pop music with greater darkness and dynamism: When Robert Alfons and Maya Postepski unexpectedly flooded the Canadian music scene with their debut album, “TRST”, in early 2012, many could hardly believe their ears. Surely the days were long gone when darkwave and synthpop merged beneath echoing vocals, giving rise to symbioses of danceability, longing, and melodic depth. However, the group’s subsequent albums “Joyland” (2014) and “The Destroyer 1 & 2” (2019) also completely refute this assumption. Like a necromancer, Alfons has since conjured up the spirit of the eighties – primarily as a solo artist under the name TR/ST – with an extraordinary flair for production, drawing inspiration from EBM and industrial yet sounding at once sensual, confrontationally physical, and yet utterly cinematic. It’s as if Bronski Beat and Dead or Alive had wandered into Trent Reznor’s studio to score a retro-futuristic coming-of-age drama. In the delicate balance of elegiac synths, basslines like fog machines, and Alfons’s wounded crooning, this sound is undeniably intense, even immediately moving, though he makes no secret of his manifold influences. The fact that he has landed on the underground cult label Dais with the album “Performance” (2024) speaks volumes for him and the quality of his productions. The fact that he is finally playing here in Hamburg this year does, too.