Laura Jane Grace In The Trauma Tropes announce new album, ‘Adventure Club’

Laura Jane Grace has announced the Friday, July 18 release of Adventure Club from Laura Jane Grace In The Trauma Tropes on Polyvinyl Record Co. A new 12-song collection exploring the archetypical hero’s journey tropes from classic Greek mythology: love, war, trust, betrayal, virtue & vice, iced coffee drinks! Featuring the help of Grace’s wife and collaborator Paris Campbell Grace (vocals) and Athens, Greece-based musicians Jacopo “Jack” Fokas (bass) and Orestis Lagadinos (drums), Adventure Club is the product of a month-long, life-changing trip and songwriting retreat in Greece that came by way of a Fellowship grant through the Onassis Foundation that provided Grace with the inspiration to create some of the best punk she’s ever made. 

Before the phrase “Adventure Club” became the title of Laura Jane Grace’s electrifying new album, it was the name for her gaggle of adventurous friends in Greece. In the summer of 2024, Grace joined an artist residency program in Athens, embedding with Greek punk rockers and exploring the ancient landscape and the city’s vibrant culture. They dove from beaches nestled in seaside caves into the Aegean and swam with sea turtles. They submitted to tourism, seeing the Parthenon and Epidaurus and breaking into the Panathenaic Stadium to run its track. They became addicted to Freddo espresso, a locals-only iced coffee topped with whipped milk. The lifestyle of this “Adventure Club” inspired her so much that, by the time she left Greece, she’d unexpectedly finished Adventure Club, a new career apogee that recalibrates what punk rock means for her now. 

Two years ago, the Onassis Foundation invited Grace to Greece. They wanted her to transform “Walls,” a century-old poem of isolation and doubt by Greece’s Constantine P. Cavafy, into a song for a short documentary about inmates learning to express themselves through film while in prison. When she traveled there in early 2024, the filmmaker assembled a pick-up band of local punk rockers (plus Paris) for a string of shows. When the brief tour was done, bad weather delayed her flight home. Waiting for her early-morning exit, she stayed up all night with the ad hoc group and Paris. They recorded a new version of “Walls,” then flew home in a delighted daze. When she returned six months later after earning a full residency with the Onassis Foundation, Grace co-wrote and cut an entire LP with Paris, bassist Jacopo Fokas, and drummer Orestis Lagadinos, that pickup group called The Trauma Tropes. 

Adventure Club is frequently a record about learning to take up space, about feeling free to be yourself as the bullshit of our ahistoric moment mounts. Protest songs and personal tunes have never been a binary for Grace, and she delivers some of her most profound — and, yes, playful — work ever at that particular intersection here. But the most prominent thread through Adventure Club’s dozen tracks is one of evolution, of letting yourself become something new.

She talks often about her age, about nearing the second half of her 40s after a lifetime as a punk. What does it mean, really, to remain a punk for 44 years? For Grace, it is the same as it’s always been — a resolve to question everything about oneself and the world around you and to allow yourself to evolve within that framework. Adventure Club epitomizes that spirit the way that the best of Laura Jane Grace’s music always has.

The young punk from Florida may never have imagined making a record in Greece, but it does not change the spirit of the songs that inspired them: to create a place where we’re all burdened by less bullshit, whether it’s our own baggage or the stuff that autocrats, capitalists, and assholes simply want to put on us because they don’t know the thrill of being happy and free themselves. Maybe they need to try writing a rock song, or simply jump into the sea.