Austin darkwave trio Troller released 'Graphic,' made a video for "Sundowner"

July 21, 2016

Austin trio Troller released their sophomore album, Graphic, earlier this year. The album was recorded with Dylan Cameron, with assistance from S U R V I V E’s Michael Stein and Silk Rodeo’s Michael McCay, and it’s a pretty fine dose of modern darkwave. It’s haunting but undeniably melodic, and things get loud sometimes, like on “Sundowner,” which just got the video treatment. Here’s what the band tells us about that song:

Sundowner is the heaviest song on the record, which makes it an absolute blast to play live because we get to really push the capabilities of our instruments and our effects. In the studio, we spent a lot of time experimenting with layers of tones on this song, and we challenged our crew and ourselves to make something as visually dense as possible. We are making videos for every song on the album, and we wanted at least one of them to feature us (the band) as the main subjects on film. So we recruited the help of our friend and painter Nicolas Nadeau to conceptualize sets of evolving paintings that used our bodies as a canvas. We had a long and grueling shoot involving getting painted, doing a take of the song, scrubbing ourselves off, and repeating over and over and over. The video comes alive in the editing room where our amazing director Melissa Cha (who also directed our first single “Not Here”), painstakingly micro-arranged dozens of raw takes of us standing, sitting, head banging, and lip-syncing into a polished and slick piece of art. This project took the cooperation of many artists from a wide range of media, and we could not be happier with way it turned out. It’s nasty yet refined and probably the coolest thing we have made to date period. Hopefully we can continue to top ourselves as we move on to the next video. We are definitely not going to stop getting more and more creatively ambitious in the studio or on camera anytime soon.

The video for “Sundowner” premieres below, alongside a stream of the full album and a list of upcoming shows (all in Texas).