total tommy, the project of Eora/Sydney songwriter Jess Holt, releases second album Trapezoid through Play It Again Sam, taking her diaristic songwriting into heavier, more distorted territory.
Written between London and Sydney and co-produced with Tom Stafford, the record draws on grunge, emo, post-punk and pop-punk, with electronic textures surfacing on Bloodshot. Wiry guitars and deadpan lyrics carry its tension between humour and heartbreak, pushing beyond the lighter, sometimes tender sound of her 2024 debut, bruises.
New single Gutterball brings that tension into everyday life: wanting change with someone you love while knowing neither of you can make it happen yet. Its central lyric, “you’re a perfect strike and I’m a gutterball,” gives the frustration a self-deprecating edge.
Holt explains:
My wife and I wrote Gutterball over a weekend away down on Sydney’s south coast. It was raining and we were drinking wine, dreaming about the adventures we wanted to take together – but the timing wasn’t aligning for us. There was a sense of frustration on both sides, each wanting a bit of a shake up from our daily lives but knowing we couldn’t just yet.
Elsewhere, Winona Forever filters nostalgia through Winona Ryder references and the image of watching Reality Bites on a red-eye flight. Pretty Little Mouth takes a sharper approach, using the “butter wouldn’t melt” cliché to examine love-bombing.
The production gives those different moods room to develop. Where bruises closed with the subdued Shark Attacks, Trapezoid finishes with the escalating distortion of Tailgate.
Holt says:
I just want it to be screaming in their face and it just felt like the right mood for the record.The album begins restrained and then it grows so much.
That louder finish also sets up the next stage: an Australian headline tour this November, with Holt joined by her four-piece band.