The Gdansk quartet rail against rightwing hate speech – and have uncovered a dark secret about their country’s Nazi past
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, the singer, guitarist and co-songwriter of Polish post-punks Trupa Trupa, is thinking of home. “At first, we said that our environment had nothing to do with our
music, but we were wrong,” he says of Gdańsk, the Baltic city the band hail from – and the site of the second world war’s first battle. “The city has a tragic history.”
This sense of tragedy seeps into the band’s music, which blends off-kilter melodies, dense instrumentation and lyrical explorations of the darkest side of the human condition. On their recent fifth album, Of the Sun, they tackle some of the bleak issues European’s face today, including
Holocaust denial and populism.