TRUE - Thank U F**k U

Vera Daroda, known artistically as True, doesn't come from a linear path, and she probably wouldn't have been interested in building one anyway. Her story runs from the Roman underground scene to Cargo Records' London, from encounters with Peter Doherty and Dan Treacy to time spent in New York's antifolk scene, all the way to the electronic music that now sits at the centre of her research. Along the way there's Sonic Youth, The Fall, Talking Heads, no wave, the Kill Rock Stars label, Sebadoh and Pavement. “Thank U F**k U” is born inside this history, but it doesn't try to sum it up. If anything, she prefers to cut across it with samplers, drum machines, minimal electronics, voice and a certain lo-fi attitude that keeps the songs from ever settling into too defined a shape. And it's precisely this freedom that represents both the record's strength and its limitation.

The guitar is now in the background. In its place come sequences, samples, drum machines and synthesizers, but the shift doesn't produce a real break with the past. What changes is the instrumentation, not the attitude: the punk sensibility remains, along with the No Wave instinct and that particular freedom of spoken word that favours gesture over formal polish. The tracks often seem built up from an accumulation of small elements: a beat, a voice, a sound, a phrase, a repetition. “French Girl”, “Dance With Me” and “Visa” show this tendency well, while “Flower” and “Sushi” bring in a lighter, more disorienting element. On “Game Over”, “Get Ride Of U” and “Police”, meanwhile, the project's more nervous, mechanical side comes to the fore.

The True project almost never goes looking for the big song in the traditional sense, but rather aims to create sonic situations, fragments, small short-circuits between rhythm and word. The problem is that not all these ideas carry the same weight. At several points the sense of spontaneity also starts to feel like material that could have used further development. Some tracks seem to stop right when they might find a sharper direction; others lean on repetition without always managing to turn it into real tension. The same rawness that, in certain passages, gives the music its immediacy risks, elsewhere, coming across as simply underworked.

It's an important distinction, because unevenness isn't automatically the same thing as creative freedom. In the case of “Thank U F**k U”, sometimes it is; other times it seems instead to be the result of writing that hasn't quite found its balance yet. The voice, too, occupies a particular space. True doesn't necessarily use it to build melodies, but as a narrative and rhythmic element, moving closer to spoken word and to a tradition with deep roots in underground culture. It's a choice consistent with the project, even if it doesn't always manage to give the songs the internal tension they need.

The lyrics across the various tracks help to trace the record's trajectory. After years spent between indie noise, punk, no wave and underground circuits, her research has now shifted towards samplers, drum machines, synths and software, with the stated intention of moving increasingly towards experimental electronic music and techno. It belongs exactly to this moment of transition. It isn't yet the definitive snapshot of the new, electronic True. It's more a record in which the past keeps making itself heard while the instruments and imagery look elsewhere. The guitar may have become, in Vera Daroda's own words, something “too retro”, but what that guitar used to represent - the punk attitude, the taste for the margins, the freedom to do things your own way - is still present.

The result, then, is interesting but uneven. There are flashes of insight, successful episodes and moments where the music finds its own particular immediacy, but also passages where the writing could have gone deeper or found a sharper form. This work, one of three conceived and made in a short span of time, isn't a perfect record, and it probably doesn't even aspire to be. It's the document of an artist who keeps changing instruments without giving up her own direction. What lingers, after the listen, is curiosity about where the project will go next, following her move to Berlin.

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16/10/2026