Ears Wide Open: Troi Irons

Kevin Bronson on March 18th, 2019

0

Troi Irons is a twentysomething alt-rocker who got an early start in music — the daughter of musicians, she taught herself to play guitar by following along to Green Day’s “American Idiot” and as a teenager she was signed to Def Jam. She released EPs in 2016 (“Turbulence”) and 2018 (“Antihero”), and there’s no small amount of defiance in her rich vocals.

Irons’ touchstones seem to be memorable artists from the ’90s with fierce emotional veracity (Alanis Morissette and Garbage have been name-checked, and maybe you can add Tracy Bonham, circa 1996), but she can shred too. Irons is taking a DIY approach to the creative process these days; she self-produced the most recent EP. Her outsider perspective shines through on the tense opener “Me Myself & I;” she takes a gritty look at the Hollywood life in “Money;” and she clearly sees herself as an “Antihero” in the title track, a good ol’ power-chord monster.

On Friday, she released her new single, “Strangers,” a strident, soft/loud/soft confessional that goes from Radiohead to metal to a spoken-word outro in dramatic fashion. “My earliest memories are of feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere,” Irons says of the new single. “In a sense, I value this alienation because it forces me to value truth over comfort. A lot of people don’t like that — they’d rather keep their eyes closed, ears shut. So it drives this cycle and I become stranger than I was. And I hate that.”

“Strangers” is a taste of her forthcoming album “Lost Angels” (release date TBA).

||| Stream: “Strangers”