Nearly four years after the stark, brooding release of Horses In The Abattoir, Toronto coldwave duo TRAITRS have returned with their fourth album, Possessor.
Forged in the isolating depths of a Toronto winter, Possessor finds band members Sean-Patrick Nolan and Shawn Tuckerat their most exposed. Written during a period marked by personal upheaval and depression, the record confronts mortality, alienation, and the fleeting nature of existence with unflinching honesty – posing questions many spend their lives avoiding: what remains when life ends, and does any of it truly matter?
“If my life ended tomorrow, I would know Possessor was directly from my heart,” Tucker says. “It’s closure, my closure. Truthfully it’s the most personal record I’ve ever written.”
The album’s creation was steeped in atmosphere – long, grey days spent watching storms roll past windows informed both its sonic palette and emotional weight. Lyrics take centre stage, shaping a record that explores humanity’s uneasy relationship with death and the psychological defenses built to ignore it.
“Possessor is our planet slowly losing air as we all suffocate in it without noticing,” the band explains. “It’s knowing everything and everyone will eventually die. There’s a lot of anger, beauty and sadness on the album… the soundtrack to a gloomy, sorrow-filled love affair.”
That emotional breadth is already evident in the album’s standout singles. Burn In Heaven surges with motorik intensity and towering vocals reminiscent of Robert Smith at his most unhinged, while unpacking the disturbing intersection of religious extremism and medicine through the tragic case of Anneliese Michel. In contrast, I was ill, you were wrongstrips everything back, offering a haunting meditation on mortality through spectral synths and aching guitar lines.
“I felt that song connected me to everything and everyone,” Tucker says. “It’s the one thing we all share… a wake-up call to live the life you want to live.”
Recorded at Wychwood Studios in Toronto alongside producer Josh Korody, (The Beaches, The Dirty Nil and Japandroids), the album captures a band shedding all pre-tense. Mastering was handled by Grammy-winning engineer Matt Colton, whose credits include Songs of a Lost World and work with Arctic Monkeys, Thom Yorke and Depeche Mode.
Sonically, Possessor draws from a lineage that includes The Smiths, The Cure and Interpol, alongside cult post-punk acts like Asylum Party and The Opposition. Yet Traitrs continue to carve out a space distinctly their own – cinematic, emotionally raw, and unafraid of darkness.
From their beginnings as bedroom artists selling cassette tapes to amassing millions of streams and touring globally, Nolan and Tucker have steadily built a reputation for intensity and authenticity. With Possessor, they arrive at their most ambitious and intimate statement yet, an album shaped as much by grief and loneliness as it is by catharsis.
Now out in the world, Possessor stands as a stark, uncompromising document of vulnerability. It’s music for those who feel too much in a world that often asks for the opposite.
