On the Rise
TTRRUUCES

When we speak, Jules Apollinaire and Natalie Findlay of TTRRUUCES are all smiles. They just wrapped a tour with Baxter Dury and arrived home to the first box of vinyls of their sophomore album, JJUUIICES. “We arrived home from the tour and it was just waiting for us,” says Findlay. “They are all over the whole house, it’s great.” Much like their self-titled debut record, JJUUIICES is difficult to define.

After meeting over coffee, Apollinaire and Findlay were brought together by a love of 60s and 70s rock and roll, intricate pop music, and pretty much everything else in between. They settled on defining themselves as a psychedelic rock band that refuses to bend at the will of the music industry. “The first album was us wanting to do a project that’s great with no rules, no boundaries,” Apollinaire explains. “We are not the type of band that you can put in a development deal. This album [JJUUIICES] is one where we only present to a team once it’s mastered and complete. There is no back and forth, there is no outside involvement.”

Although Apollinaire and Findlay first met in the summer of 2014, it’d take a few years of making music and writing songs together before they decided to embark on a project together. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, they released their debut record which doubled as a rock opera that followed two fictional characters attempting to obtain a new drug called TTRRUUCES. Where the band’s debut record was recorded in a little house by the sea in France, JJUUIICES was made at home in their newly built studio. It was a juxtaposing experience, but one that they found refreshing. “At the time we were experimenting with new sounds that made us massively eager to go back into TTRRUUCES mode — the project where we experiment the most,” says Apollinaire.

After running away to France to make the first record, they wanted to both honour the musical family they’ve been growing and the desire to experiment as much as possible. This meant trying something new for JJUUIICES — bringing in collaborations from their band. “Violeta [Vicci] is an incredible player but also an incredible woman to have in our studio,” states Findlay. “Having her, along with Ben [Simon] on bass and Connor [Burnside] on drums brought something new that opened another door for us.” It created a new “outburst of energy,” according to Apollinaire. “We don’t really control how things turn out, but it’s about being open to new interests and whatever we love is going to come through.”

The band were actually hand-selected by Baxter Dury as the support for his tour — just another serendipitous moment for the pair. “We knew so many bands were up for that at the time,” says Findlay. “I did a session with Baxter years and years ago and we’ve stayed in touch. Our agent asked if anyone had an ‘in’ with him so I messaged him begging to take us on tour because we love him so much,” she laughs. “He replied and said, ‘You’re in.’”

As part of JJUUIICES initiation, Apollinaire, Findlay, and their band added songs from the album to test them out in front of a live audience on the Baxter Dury tour. For them, it gave them an entirely new life. “We added a song called ‘Luxury of Self Destruction’ and we had only ever rehearsed it,” states Findlay. “Once you play something in a room full of people, you realise how it needs to be performed live. For me, it added another layer to the song — it showed me how I want to move when I’m playing it. It made me think we need to play it every day.”

Standouts on the album “Another Day” and “Ooh Baby” are quintessentially TTRRUUCCES, soaked in the cross-genre sonics their fans are used to. “Another Day” was first inspired by Findlay procrastinating and feeling a creative block only for the song to completely fix everything (“If I put it on paper and get it out, the fun can return and we can make more music,” she says.) “Ooh Baby” was born out of a musician’s worst nightmare: the original file accidentally got deleted by Findlay. “This is a good story, actually,” laughs Apollinaire. “There are moments where we're really production-focused and really trying to break down and there are moments where it is just the two of us and the song writes itself. We really got into the psych-rock slopes of the song and the computer crashed, but Natalie didn’t know you just had to reopen it and save it. We tried to redo it but we actually really love how the final version turned out.”

As a whole, the album is an eclectic kaleidoscope of the pair’s lives that they hope their fans will take and create their own narratives around. “The first album was in the middle of COVID so I think we had a massive amount of people that resonated so deeply with it because the world was in a weird place. TTRRUUCES is either a source of escapism or their way of describing the weird world we live in. I like that we can’t control how people listen to our music — if we did control it, it probably wouldn’t be worth experiencing. The world has changed since the last time we released an album and we don’t know how people are going to experience this one, I’m just excited for it not to be ours anymore and let it be.”