Carnivalfinds the Fort Worth trauma ray captures some of their strongest, most intense, and exploratory work within the boundaries of a whirlwind year. The breakout success of Chameleon, their 2024 debut on Dais Records, further established the band amidst the current wave of shoegaze revivalists, yet increasingly agile, able to weave between scenes, touring throughout 2025 with the likes of Deafheaven, Loathe, and TouchéAmoré. A confluence of blitzing riffs and stark beauty, theirsound continues to evolve, nodding to loud-quiet-loud greats across metal, grunge, and shoegaze from Slowdive to Smashing Pumpkins. Carnival delves into moodier, more cerebral material, like holding theirpast excursions against a funhouse mirror. There's a distinct sense ofunease in these songs, built as a band in a fleeting window of time, proving they work best under pressure and when pulling from thedarkest corners of their subconscious. The wordless "Carousel" ushers in the EP's unsettling atmosphere withblasts of static and downcast strums giving way to "Hannibal", ananthemic track packed with power riffs and raw emotion. The band has hit this kind of sheer power before, from 2018's "Solstice" to Chameleon's title track, while "Hannibal" contorts with a tinge ofunprecedented evil, slithery, "Stone Temple-y, Alice in Chains-y," Avilaquips. Lyrically, he taps into teenage angst, the feeling of beingdissected and rejected."Méliès", named after the French illusionist and filmmakercuts betweenheavy, sludgy chords and a skyward chorus, "from something scary tolike a dream state," says Avila, who channels the namesake's surrealabstraction. His lines detail, "being stuck in your head and just making uprealities that probably aren't the real thing going on, when you don't wantto face the truth.""Funhouse" dips into doom metal, with sparse guitarwork and possibly the band's slowest ever BPM, as self-proclaimedSleep-heads. Lyrics play with shifting perspectives, culminating in the call-and-response outro ("take my hand / this is not your wonderland")that conjures two forces, or frames of mind, at odds with one another. In contrast, the final track "Clown" jolts, flashes, and pummels, like thelistener has come out the other end of a house of horrors, now fullyimmersed in the jarring, disorienting lights of the carnival. Personified bya knotty, synthy lead guitar squal—"the lead tone is something I'm superproud of, we've never had something like that in a trauma ray song," perPerez—"Clown" reminds them of Robin Williams, an archetype of tragic happiness, how the people trying the hardest to make others laugh mayprivately be the saddest. Sonically, the band is quick to credit theinfluence of “Undone” and “Stuck on You” by '90s cult favorite Failure, alongside the omnipresentLoveless, which gets to the greatness oftrauma ray: five musicians absorbing, synthesising, and expanding onwhat they love. Carnival offers a brief and highly loopable detour intodarkness from a band growing more formidable by the mile.
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