TRUANT
A recently Deceased band
While sitting in an around THE block line at Paper Tiger, San Antonio’s “most cutting edge music venue” (you can thank the Instagram bio of P.T. for that quote), Truant was opening for Your Arms Are My Cocoon. While performing, Truant fills the room with elecTricity; you would not expect that they had only been together for about a year. You might’ve read the title - recently deceased band - it’s true; they played their last show this year. As a parting gift, they’re releasing a song with Four Way Dance Party, with another project coming soon called A New Day (truly). Enjoy these words I shared with Truant, listen to their music, check out their members’ other projects (Because We Could Not Stop, Menorah, and A HollyWood Ending), and support local shows 5ever.
Nellie: I’m here today with Truant, hi! To start, if your art could be a form of physical media, what would it be?
Brenden (VOX): CD. That’s like, my personal favorite, how about you guys?
Elijah (DRUMS): Probably yeah, CD. Going back to that, you know, the history of the whole scene. Either CD’s for me personally or cassette tapes. You know like back in the 90’s and 80’s whenever this style was really starting to coming out. They’re awesome.
David (GUITAR): I say Spotify.
N: How did you guys come up with your name?
David: Our friend George, when we were trying to start a band originally, we were at school and we heard on the intercom that if students are late for two weeks or don’t go for two weeks then you will be called truant. So he (George) texted me immediately. He was like, “Yo, you were trying to look for one more band name? What about truant?” That happened like two years ago, and so when we started a band about a year ago that was the first name that came to mind.
N: That was one question I had, I saw you guys startED publishing music (on streaming services) in 2024. How did you guys meet? Did you work on previous projects together?
Brenden: I hadn’t worked on anything. This was– he was my whole introduction to music pretty much.
David: I didn’t have a band or anything, so I met Brendan one summer, the end of summer, and he came over and was asking me all about guitar so I was showing him some of the music that I was into. Next thing you know we started jamming a little and we met Elijah through his previous band.
Elijah: Yeah, I was in a hardcore band called Makaria. We were in the scene for like late-2021 to around mid-2022, I want to say: and actually, I knew of David, I just hadn’t really talked to him. We were in jazz band together for a few years and then, yeah– we just never had the nerve to talk to each other until we met Brenden. I actually met him in my stats class of all places.
N: In high school?
Elijah: Yeah, we all went to the same high school!
Aiden (GUITAR): I’m the lone wolf.
N: How did you (Aiden) meet them?
Elijah: I could explain.
Aiden: Hell yeah explain it bro.
Elijah: So, we met him through another band, we were not a part of it, but we went to go see them, and it was this band called Menorah and we were both big fans of them. Brenden ended up started to– started to record videos for them, right?
Brenden: Yeah, I was recording videos for Menorah going with the talent to in-town shows.
Elijah: Yeah, and then I saw that he started a project called Truant, and I really liked the way he did his vocals. I was in another project, it was called “Because We Could Not Stop”. I asked Brenden if he could do vocals because we didn’t have anybody, so he did vocals for us for how long?
Brenden: About half a year. I was balancing both Truant and Because.
Elijah: It goes into a whole nice story.
N: What’s your process to making music as a collective now?
Brenden: Initially, it was just coming up with an idea, but as we started to grow as musicians and as people we started to be more collaborative with our music and just like everyone having an opinion on something and ask you like, “hey what do you think about this?” That’s how we started writing our music, it was just pretty recently that we started adopting a process.
N: I was listening to your music earlier, I love how And Nothing and Dorksflyhigher blend together. Were they originally one project split into two, or did you write them individually?
Elijah: They– we recorded and nothing and, what’s it called, FiveIvyIndustry, those were our first songs that we had completed. So we released that on voice memo and then we wanted to like, re-release it on a better mix and everything. We recorded it with Nick G and he recorded and mixed it for us and we re-released it.
Brenden: We just wanted a better mix for those songs, just to do them justice. That’s why the whole project was called Concluding Intentions because we wanted to have a better mix on FiveIvy and And Nothing. Then we wanted to introduce DorksFlyHigher which we had just recently written.
N: That’s great, final question, what’s something you wish people would notice about your music whether at a live show or when streaming it.
David: We just want to have fun, it’s not really anything deeper than that I would say, we just really like making music with eachother and thats why I feel like all of our projects that we’ve released–
Brenden: The art is just us and our friends
David: Yeah.
Brenden: We like– we love doing this for our friends and just for ourselves, with music.
N: Thank you guys, any closing statements? Final thoughts?
Brenden: Listen to Menorah and Becausewecouldnotstop.
Article by Nellie Clark