Two days before Labor Day, waking up early this morning, rereading Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and typing up another review feels like a ritual for me. My mornings usually consist of waking up, playing some Microsoft Solitaire, video game, or reading something from DC Comics, and putting on an album that gets my ears perked up to see whether it’s any good or not. Today, that album is Wasteland, the upcoming release from Portuguese heavy-psych outfit Travo.
Travo is a Braga, Portugal-based four-piece that formed in 2016 and has spent the past decade developing its own strange and explosive mixture of psychedelic, space, progressive, krautrock, and heavy music. Their discography has steadily evolved from n’O SILO in 2018 and Ano Luz in 2019 to Sinking Creation in 2022 and Astromorph God in 2023. Now, with Wasteland, the band is pushing that sound into heavier, darker, and more metallic territory.
And that is exactly what makes Wasteland such a wild experience. This may be one of Travo’s loudest, darkest, and most hypnotic releases yet, a record built around an aggressive, cosmic voyage that is waiting to strap you into the roller coaster and send you flying into a strange and unpredictable journey.
Listening to this new album feels like a homecoming for the band, yet at the same time, it sounds like they are challenging themselves to go somewhere they have never gone before. Heavy space-rock synths come hurling at you out of the blue, creating the feeling of a light-speeding powder keg just waiting to explode.
With Jaime Gomez Arellano handling the production, mixing, and mastering, TRAVO is given plenty of room to break the rules and throw the big book into the fire. The result is their own star-gating voyage, one that showcases nods to bands such as Motorpsycho, Hawkwind, Ash Ra Tempel, The Mars Volta, Jennifer Gentle, and Blood Incantation without simply copying any of them. Instead, Travo takes these influences and launches them into its own psychedelic orbit.
There is also an ambient quality throughout the album, with elements of the Berlin School of electronic music coming to mind, along with flashes of early Pink Floyd from the post-Barrett period between 1968 and 1972. From its throttling hyperspace momentum, psychedelic-metallic guitar arrangements, heart-pounding drumbeats, fuzztone bass, tidal-wave drum climaxes, and vocals that shift from clean singing to snarling “cookie-monster” growls, Travo knows exactly how to keep the listener on edge.
Then there are the wah-wah guitar textures, pummelling tribal drum-and-bass passages, and rhythmic sections that nearly made me think of the legendary Zeuhl masters Magma. At other moments, the music feels like a cosmic cat-and-mouse chase straight out of a Tom and Jerry short, only this time, the chase is happening somewhere beyond the stars.
It’s a balls-out, out-of-this-world powerhouse of a record. Wasteland isn’t simply a great album; it’s the kind of album that demands repeat listens. Every spin reveals another strange sound, another riff, another rhythmic shift, or another psychedelic passage that makes you want to go back and hear it again.
Travo have come a long way since their early days, and Wasteland shows just how far they are willing to push themselves. They kick down the doors, flip the switch, give Star Wars and Star Trek the big, giant middle finger, and blast straight through the cosmos toward unknown worlds.
So, buckle yourself in, turn the volume up, and prepare for impact. Travo’s Wasteland is one hell of a cosmic trip, and the journey is only beginning.
