{"title":"Trauma Ray","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"chameleon-11","title":"Chameleon","description":"\u003cp\u003eSince first bonding over Slowdive at a Texas karaoke bar six years ago, musicians Uriel Avila and Jonathan Perez have grown trauma ray into Fort Worth’s foremost flag bearer of crushing shoegaze. A five-piece rounded out by bassist Darren Baun, drummer Nicholas Bobotas, and guitarist Coleman Pruitt, the band’s debut album, \u003ci\u003eChameleon\u003c\/i\u003e, captures their evolving sound at an apex of majestic devastation. A fusion of downer hooks, gauzy melancholia, and bulldozer riffs, the album heaves and crashes across 50 minutes of stacked amplifier alchemy. Lyrically the songs trace similarly lofty and brooding terrain; Avila says “The theme is death. And a chameleon, like death, can shape-shift in and out our lives in different forms.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eChameleon\u003c\/i\u003e opens with \"Ember,” dreamy and distant, alternately anthemic and apocalyptic, defeated and deafening. Lead single \"Bishop\" perfectly encapsulates trauma ray’s depth and dimension, ripping out of the gate with “the biggest, baddest, saddest wall of sound.” Lyrics about being burnt at the stake and \"tossed in the flame\" float above a stop-start assault of precision distortion, eventually expanding into a lush, heavy, sorrowful end coda. \"Spectre\" is a mysterious, introspective dirge, envisioned as a \"mellow, slowcore, Duster-thing,\" all feeling and heavy fuzz chords (with no lead guitar). Avila wrote it, \"to be a hymnal\" from the perspective of someone who won't let go - a ghost, an ex, a shadow self.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlthough the album is rich with subtleties, graceful lulls, and \"breaths of air,\" the band’s three guitar attack is its defining force, a power flexed to its peak on \"Bardo.\" Perez’s intentions were blunt: “I wanted to write a riff that was hard as fuck.” The result is alternately mean and eerie, veering between noisy one string bends and surging headbang, mapping a middle ground between Unwound and early-Deftones. One of trauma ray’s greatest gifts is their ability to make doomy, sledgehammer heaviness sound like an earworm, without production tricks or gimmicks: “Riff, verse, chorus, three guitar parts – that’s all you need.” This quality is particularly apparent on the title track, a churning slab of amplifier worship, swirling chords, and heavenly, defeated vocals about not belonging, shape-shifting, and death (“A twisted face \/ Void of attention \/ An empty space \/ In your reflection”).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“U.S.D.D.O.S” closes the album, swaying across seven minutes of grey skied guitar and haunted voice, subtly thickening as it deepens. Feedback and shrapnel gradually begin raining down, like a satellite disintegrating in the atmosphere. Titled as an acronym after a poem by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño that loosely translates to “a dream within a dream,” the melody softens, smears, and then disappears, slowly swallowed by the gravity of eternal descent. Chameleon is a masterpiece of craft, balance, melody, lyricism, and gravity, flexing a fresh vision of loud-quiet-loud architectures and the vertigo depths of blasted harmonics. From Slowdive to Nothing, to Hum and beyond, the band absorb and expand on their influences into a rare and dedicated alchemy. trauma ray's cinematic tempest is a gathering storm only just taking flight.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dais","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50465466253643,"sku":"2216344","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Green LP","offer_id":50465466679627,"sku":"2216345","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50465465893195,"sku":"2216343","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/TRAUMA_RAY_-_CHAMELEON_-_PACKSHOT_2461c06f_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727289701"},{"product_id":"carnival-3","title":"Carnival","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"UTF-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCarnival finds the Fort Worth trauma ray captures some of their strongest, most intense, and exploratory work within the boundaries of a whirlwind year. The breakout success of \u003cem\u003eChameleon\u003c\/em\u003e, their 2024 debut on Dais Records, further established the band amidst the current wave of shoegaze revivalists, yet increasingly agile, able to weave between scenes, touring throughout 2025 with the likes of Deaf Heaven, Loathe, and Touché Amoré. A confluence of blitzing riffs and stark beauty, their sound continues to evolve, nodding to loud-quiet-loud greats across metal, grunge, and shoegaze from Slowdive to Smashing Pumpkins. \u003cem\u003eCarnival\u003c\/em\u003e delves into moodier, more cerebral material, like holding their past excursions against a funhouse mirror. There's a distinct sense of unease in these songs, built as a band in a fleeting window of time, proving they work best under pressure and when pulling from the darkest corners of their subconscious. The wordless \"Carousel\" ushers in the EP's unsettling atmosphere with blasts of static and downcast strums giving way to \"Hannibal\", an anthemic track packed with power riffs and raw emotion. The band has hit this kind of sheer power before, from 2018's \"Solstice\" to Chameleon's title track, while \"Hannibal\" contorts with a tinge of unprecedented evil, slithery, \"Stone Temple-y, Alice in Chains-y,\" Avilaquips. Lyrically, he taps into teenage angst, the feeling of being dissected and rejected.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\"Méliès\", named after the French illusionist and filmmaker cuts between heavy, sludgy chords and a skyward chorus, \"from something scary to like a dream state,\" says Avila, who channels the namesake's surreal abstraction. His lines detail, \"being stuck in your head and just making up realities that probably aren't the real thing going on, when you don't want to face the truth. “Funhouse\" dips into doom metal, with sparse guitarwork and possibly the band's slowest ever BPM, as self-proclaimed Sleep-heads. Lyrics play with shifting perspectives, culminating in the call-and-response outro (\"take my hand \/ this is not your wonderland\")that conjures two forces, or frames of mind, at odds with one another. In contrast, the final track \"Clown\" jolts, flashes, and pummels, like the listener has come out the other end of a house of horrors, now fully immersed in the jarring, disorienting lights of the carnival. Personified by a knotty, synthy lead guitar squal—\"the lead tone is something I'm super proud of, we've never had something like that in a trauma ray song,\" per Perez—\"Clown\" reminds them of Robin Williams, an archetype of tragic happiness, how the people trying the hardest to make others laugh may privately be the saddest. Sonically, the band is quick to credit the influence of “Undone” and “Stuck on You” by '90s cult favorite Failure, alongside the omnipresent Loveless, which gets to the greatness of trauma ray: five musicians absorbing, synthesising, and expanding on what they love. \u003cem\u003eCarnival\u003c\/em\u003e offers a brief and highly loopable detour into darkness from a band growing more formidable by the mile.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dais","offers":[{"title":"LP - Red into Clear","offer_id":56297727197515,"sku":"R1958-3723","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":56297727230283,"sku":"R1958-4537","price":23.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/a7206d6f-01c8-5861-b4fa-212fb1ea1b99.jpg?v=1768317399"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/fr\/collections\/trauma-ray.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}