True Body’s “Love Spell” Shimmers and Soars with Head over Heels Post-Punk Romance

True Body is a band that sprang forth from the roiling swelter of a late Virginia summer in 2013, uncoiling like a fever dream set to a drum machine’s heartbeat. Their earliest lament, Give Us Your Light, whispered and wailed in the language of synth-drenched sorrow, a voice trembling between exaltation and collapse. Now comes Love Spell, a thundering incantation, a breath of silk followed by a fist through glass: aching and aching again, but never in the same place twice.

True Body’s music, neither one thing nor the other, blooms and burns with a restless grace, like streetlights blinking awake in a city that never agreed on nightfall. Their sound is not has organically transformed into something yet unwritten, its course uncharted, stretching past the limits of what has been spoken, into the wild silence of what is still to come. Still, there are echoes of INXS, Wolfgang Press, Blancmange, and contemporaries such as White Lies, The Horrors, and Curses.

As an album, Love Spell unspools like a fractured vision, its pieces scattered, stitched, and reshaped by instinct alone. It does not move in straight lines; it coils and careens, shifts, and stirs, pulling the listener deeper into its tangled thicket. Voices swell from unseen corners, rise and recoil, beckoning toward the unknown, where something waits: something restless, urgent, impossible to ignore.  With Love Spell, the band stretches into new terrain, bending sound until it bends back. It smolders, it wails, it trembles on the verge of collapse before surging forward again: feedback shrieking, riffs tumbling in like thunder over deep, glimmering pools of tone.

The record unfurls in shivers and sighs, beginning with Not The Same, where love, once solid, now crumbles, its edges worn thin, its weight uneven. The past looms, its grip unrelenting, its echoes stretching long into the night. Doubt seeps in, slow as water through fractured stone, pooling in the spaces where trust once lived. Hands reach, tremble, vanish. A plea without reply. A promise made in silence. A self unraveled, piece by piece.

Then comes Breathe, where existence flickers between static and signal, a transmission half-heard, half-felt, half-lost. Life reduced to numbers, to wires, to prayers recited through circuits that neither listen nor care. Time snaps, faces blur, and walls built from plastic and pretense close in. Was there ever a moment untouched by artificial hands? Was the body ever more than a digital whisper?

Colder 1.08 drifts in like a ghost of something whole, something almost real. A night stretched thin between love and longing, between holding on and letting go. Two bodies drawn close, but never quite touching, never quite sure. Sacrifices made, but was it enough? Sleep evades, desire burns, and in the quiet spaces between, a question lingers: was it ever truly meant to last?

The video, directed by Finger Trap Productions, is a gorgeously lush performance video of the band onstage, illuminated by a crystal chandelier and psychedelic projections. It captures their energy and camaraderie, a lovely idea of what they’re like performing live. Watch below:

Time loosens its grip in Hypno, uncoiling in silken waves where hands meet skin and sensation shivers electric. Touch lands swift, lingers slow—tenderness bound to urgency, sweetness cut with steel. Past and future slip silent, swallowed whole by the press of lips, the lock of eyes, the hush between. The world dims, pared down to movement and breath, to heat and hush, to the fleeting eternity of bodies bound together in the briefest, deepest now.

Then Pink Light flickers, humming low with longing sharpened by restraint. A murmur turns command, a plea bends into an offering. Pain, shaped and sculpted, stains the skin in red devotion. Words drip thick, syrup-slow, gilding the room in fevered glow. A dollhouse world, delicate and dire, where hands tighten and fire lingers. The watcher watches, the flame consumes, and nothing remains but want.

Veil Song/Albemarle does not ask, it demands. A son cries out, a sword replies. Fire licks flesh, etching fate in open wounds. Love breaks, masks slip, and a mother’s gaze clings like a curse. Innocence severed, history rewritten in blood. The past screams, the present smolders. Eyes drop, tongues still, and silence devours what little is left.

The gears grind, the machine breathes, endless and empty in Xenia, its hunger never sated, its reach never stilled. Generations spill forward, their futures funneled into something vast and faceless, something that does not look back. Roads stretch long, horizons smudge, but sight betrays, light bends wrong, pride blinds, silence chokes what should be spoken. The walls close in, red stains run deep, faith frays where hands should clasp. Power trades hands, bodies barter warmth, and wires whisper in the dark. The cycle loops, tightening its grip, never breaking.

Lazuli stumbles, teeters, the high wire act shaking beneath tired feet. Let it fall, let it rot: the ending has been inked, the words are weight. Cold seeps in, the stillness before the ruin. Then the flicker, then the failure, and in its absence, desire coils like a wire sparking in the dark. The city swells, the song shifts, love sharpens its edges, precision cut and wicked. She carves deep, and still, when the lights gutter out, the ache lingers. In Catch Up, the tide calls, weightless and wild, pulling bodies into the dark. There is no line, no tether, only the swell and crash. Fate, chance—it matters no more. The night splits wide, music spills from the wound, and all that remains is motion. You Are Open Window hums with its own quiet rhythm. Straps hold, silence soothes, pain learns to speak another tongue. Smiles bend wrong, hands steady, the body gives, the mind submits. And still, the song repeats…we feel fine.

Producer Sasha Stroud laid the foundation, ensuring the band hit with full force, while Ben Greenberg honed their sound, sharpening its weight and intensity. Now, they’re teaming up with Ian Rose of UVTV to record a new EP.

Over the years, True Body has released three LPs, along with a steady stream of EPs and singles, all while touring nationally—whether on their own or alongside artists like Gost, Mary Jane Dunphe, Portrayal of Guilt, Pharmakon, and Uniform.