Collapsing major-label deals, a disintegrating marriage, a quantity of drugs that would make Hunter S Thompson demur – Royal Trux have been through things that would have killed many bands stone dead. To be fair, it did knock them out of commission for a little over 15 years. But in the years following their 2000 swansong Pound For Pound, there was the lingering sense that Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema never quite put thoughts of their former group behind them. Herrema’s subsequent band RTX – later renamed Black Bananas – channelled more than a little of Trux’s dissolute hard-rock energy. Hagerty’s work under the name The Howling Hex, meanwhile, felt firmly rooted more in Trux’s more haywire, experimental side.

In 2012, Hagerty was planning a live re-enactment of Royal Trux’s notoriously out-there 1990 double LP Twin Infinitives when Herrema got wind. Instead of getting mad, she got in touch, the pair got to talking – and in 2015 they made their live return at California’s Beserktown Festival. Royal Trux were officially back on the road.

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White Stuff – the first studio album since Royal Trux’s reformation – is a reaffirmation of the group’s core values: the raw thrill of rock’n’roll, and the realisation that trash, when looked at the right way, can appear a kind of treasure. Weirdly recorded, weirdly mixed, their take on rock music feels mutant, radioactive – the equivalent of that three-eyed fish from The Simpsons. Hagerty’s guitars chunter and wail, sometimes echoing classic rock moves, other times wandering off on weird melodic tangents inspired by Ornette Coleman’s philosophy of harmolodics, the jazz saxophonist’s attempt to break free of conventional musical notation into new realms of raw expression. “Year Of The Dog” and “Under Ice” feature translucent keyboard washes and distorted electronics that arc across the frame. And firing through everything is the pair’s unmistakable chorus, Hagerty’s stoner drawl and Herrema’s wildcat yowl weaving in and around each other like a pair of drunks on the dodgems.

It goes without saying that this is a pretty singular brew. Royal Trux are kind of like The Fall in the respect that it’s hard to get a handle on what any given song might be about – they speak a language that’s all their own – but great lines pop up over and over, like bugs splatting on a windscreen. “I got a baseball bat and a handful of nails!” the pair holler on “Under Ice”. “South Californian drivers are the 19th wonder of the world!” goes “Purple Audacity #1”, a simmering funk excursion that finds Hagerty whipping up wild peals of guitar feedback. Someone called “Whopper Dave” winds up with a donut to the head. “Suburban Junkie Lady”, meanwhile, is a character sketch that’s sung with genuine warmth. “You’ve got nickels in your dimes/It happens all the time,” they chorus, sweetly.

Has anything changed in Truxland in the last decade and a half? The Kool Keith-featuring “Get Used To It”, released last October but not included here, appears to have been a little bit of a red herring, promising a new rap-boogie direction that never quite arrived. “Sic Em Slow”, with its ringing chimes and hand-drum percussion, gestures to the influence of Japanese ambient music – although Hagerty takes care to chain it to one of the album’s best, ugliest riffs.

Ultimately, perhaps the track that sums up Royal Trux 2.0 is White Stuff’s title track. It’s a voracious anthem to tour life with triumphalist chorus: “This is the way it’s supposed to be/Push me on a cart through the duty free/ Hanging and playin’ all across the land/Tellin’ everybody we’re the greatest band…” But there might be a note of caution buried in there too – a warning about chemical excess from a band that have certainly lived it. Arguably, other groups have taken up their baton in their absence – think Ariel Pink’s damaged rock deconstructions, 
or new-wave garage sorts like The Kills, who borrow the style, if not the substance. But Royal Trux remain unique, one of a kind: still going wrong like a hydrogen bomb.

The April 2019 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – with John Lennon on the cover. Inside, you’ll find Keith Richards, Anne Briggs, Edwyn Collins, Lou Reed, Humble Pie, Robert Forster, Jenny Lewis, James Brown and much more. Our 15-track CD also showcases the best of the month’s new music, including Pond, Ex Hex, Hand Habits, Lambchop, Stephen Malkmus, Kel Assouf and Patty Griffin.

Julia Jacklin’s 2016 debut, Don’t Let The Kids Win, captured the Australian songwriter in a sort of existential no man’s land; as she approached her mid-twenties, she felt like everyone had a life plan except her. She worked on a factory production line, writing music in her free time. She’d long contemplated pursuing a career as a social worker. Instead, motivated by her love of Aldous Harding’s sound, she spent her savings on a month in a Christchurch studio with Harding’s collaborator Ben Edwards, and the very act of sharing those songs that fretted about her future plotted her a new course.

If Jacklin was looking for a kind of certainty, then she got it – almost two years of solid touring ensued. The parallel to that was that her romantic relationship was crumbling. Instead of the tentative questioning of its predecessor, then, Crushing is most definitely about one core theme – recovery from savage heartbreak. And it is breathtakingly raw.

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The process may be familiar, but the 
way Jacklin journeys through the stages with stark vulnerability means it feels wholly fresh: from the explosive separation to a determined acceptance, via all the emotional turbulence in between. But it’s also about healing, Jacklin gradually reknitting together the gap between her body and mind that had grown to be so cavernous.

The pure detail means it’s not a standard break-up collection, but 
rather one so intimately relayed that 
the listener practically wears the experience with her. It’s right there in 
the opening song, “Body”, built on a simple, shadowy guitar line. The story 
of a man-child pulled up for smoking 
in the toilets on a short-haul flight, ruining a weekend away. “There on the Sydney tarmac/I threw my luggage down/I said I’m gonna leave you/I’m 
not a good woman when you’re around,” she sings, as the subject later threatens 
to weaponise a private image. “Naked 
on your bed looking straight at ya/Do you still have that photograph?/Would you use it to hurt me?” The repeated outro line of “I guess it’s just my life/And it’s 
just my body” ramming home the subject’s manipulation.

The Angel Olsen-esque “Head Alone” was written on the road, where Jacklin spent hours staring out of tourvan windows. The song bleeds like a fresh cut, a demand from the singer for psychological and physical space in a notoriously claustrophobic touring environment. “I don’t want to be touched all the time,” she asserts. “I raised my body up to be mine.” The more pacy garage rock of “Pressure To Party” follows, and marks the beginning 
of the rebuild – the loaded choice 
between ‘getting back out there’ to meet someone new, versus the familiar comfort of an old flame. “I’ve locked myself in my room/But I’ll open up the door and try to love again soon,” she decides in that moment.

Jacklin does this time and time again, puts herself through the wringer, preserving and processing the hurt. “Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You” is a tender country-folk ballad – in the vein of past tourmates Whitney – while “When The Family Flies In”, just Jacklin accompanied by a piano, is the album’s lowest point, in both tempo and frame of mind. Finger-picked acoustic number “Convention” is a sarcastic swipe at strangers who impart uninvited ‘advice’, and “Good Guy” evokes the loneliness 
of the rebound. “Tell me I’m the love of your life/Just for a night even if you don’t feel it,” she trills.

Things reach a visceral apex on the penultimate “Turn Me Down”, a track so exposed that recording it left Jacklin emotionally “ruined”. When she finally got it taped – the cracks and quivers in her voice are audible, the production defiantly un-airbrushed – she was 
lying on the vocal booth floor, which led to an “awkward moment” when a 16-year-old studio intern came in to check she was still OK. It’s a genuine relief to hear Jacklin sing, “I’ll be OK, I’ll be alright, I’ll get well soon, sleep through the night,” as closing track “Comfort” fades away.

It’s a moment that brings full circle a family of songs that are strikingly evocative, but never overwrought. Were Crushing soundtracking a film visualising the story it might have audiences battling an urge to reach through the cinema screen to console the protagonist. But that might not help – after all, heartbreak is lonely, unpredictable and personal, and no 
two experiences of it are identical. 
Here’s Jacklin’s, a powerful take on 
the oldest inspiration of them all.

The April 2019 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – with John Lennon on the cover. Inside, you’ll find Keith Richards, Anne Briggs, Edwyn Collins, Lou Reed, Humble Pie, Robert Forster, Jenny Lewis, James Brown and much more. Our 15-track CD also showcases the best of the month’s new music, including Pond, Ex Hex, Hand Habits, Lambchop, Stephen Malkmus, Kel Assouf and Patty Griffin.