Truthpaste – Bus Song
Truthpaste are a Manchester-formed, London-based five-piece who have spent three singles carefully refusing to stay in one lane. Their debut “See You Around” earned a Steve Lamacq co-sign; “Bleary Eyes” pushed further into folk-electronic territory. Both vinyl runs sold out. “Bus Song”, their first release of 2026 on Dirty Hit and Memorials of Distinction, pivots again — this time toward what vocalist and saxophonist Esmé Lark calls the band’s “emo rock” side.
The lineup is: Lark (vocals, saxophone), Euan McNeill (bass, guitar, vocals), Theo Murchie (guitar, vocals), Claire Sun (violin, vocals), and James Ballarò (synth, lapsteel, guitar). Then there’s the drum machine — a fixture born of practical necessity. “At university, when we lived in tiny rooms, we couldn’t afford to rent a studio”, Lark explains, “so the electronic drums allowed us to rehearse anywhere”. That constraint shaped how the band writes: committed, fully structured from the start, no room for loose ends.
“Bus Song” is a duet — McNeill and Lark trading verses over minor-key guitar lines, saxophone cutting through wavey synths that drone beneath the mix. The saxophone isn’t decorative; Lark describes it as “a way for me to sing without singing”, and you can hear that in how it threads through the outro, which erupts into a controlled kind of chaos before settling. McNeill had the melody in his head for weeks before the band got hold of it. “It wasn’t until we got together as a band and decided to make it a duet that it really started to feel like it has come to be”, he says. What catches me is that outro — the way it holds back, holds back, then finally lets go.
The lyricism stays grounded in something specific: the rhythm of a bus journey, two people trying to meet in the middle, stop by stop. It’s a small, precise metaphor, and the band doesn’t oversell it. “The meaning hasn’t needed to be thought about”, McNeill says. “‘Bus Song’ was always the name of the song”. That kind of instinctive clarity shows up in the track’s best moments — there’s nothing here that feels assembled by committee, even though five people made it.
“We never came in with a sound in mind”, Lark says. “We all have different tastes, backgrounds and genres. It all kind of melts together into something quite different from each individual person would make on their own”. Three singles in, that’s starting to sound less like a mission statement and more like a demonstrated fact. “Bus Song” is here because it genuinely surprised me — I didn’t expect the emo pivot to land this cleanly, and it does.
Tour Dates Europe:
- 26 March — London, UK — Old Blue Last (TGE Warm Up)
- 10 April — Falmouth, UK — Wanderfal Festival
- 11 April — Bristol, UK — Outer Town
- 4 May — London, UK — The Lexington
- 5 May — Leeds, UK — Hyde Park Book Club
- 6 May — Manchester, UK — Soup Kitchen
- 7 May — Leicester, UK — The Big Difference
- 15 May — Brighton, UK — The Great Escape
- 16 May — Brighton, UK — The Great Escape
