Buckle up, Travo goes pedal to the metal with Wasteland. Bear witness to the latest, greatest psychedelic space-prog madness that’ll fuel your days with endless energy.
Release date: October 2, 2026 | Fuzz Club | Bandcamp | Instagram | Facebook | Fuzz Club
As much as I loved Slift‘s Fantasia earlier this year, I still felt myself yearning for an album that draws its power from the cosmos, and dishes it out to the the listener without filter, hitting like a death star blast. Along comes Travo, and despite an extensive back catalogue, the Braga-based Portuguese band hadn’t quite landed on my musical shores until this year. Wasteland, their fourth release, ticks off everything I had on my wishlist, with a familiar yet altogether fresh sound, packed full of rip-roaring energy that plants the album firmly in my top five of 2026.
The four piece are very much like the aforementioned Slift, and their back catalogue has a really raw and gritty but chaotic space-psych-rock sound to it. 2023’s Astromorph God is where they really started to hit their stride, I feel, differentiating their sound through heavier and more consistent vocals, whilst still paired with plenty of cosmic groove. Despite the frenetic pace of the tracks, it’s very easy to drift off to the music and lock in to tasks. Cooking, gaming, hell – writing this review at this speed is fun as fuck too.
“Burial” could not be a better opener for Wasteland. From nought to one hundred without a second to catch your breath, the drums, guitars, and synths ratchet up and keep going for nearly five minutes. Layers and layers of hypnotic riffs, feedback loops, and insane drumming collide, all the while the batshit crazy screaming of Gonçalo Ferreira ties it together perfectly with a clear structure and orchestration to the madness. The track keeps on escalating to a final climax, tying it off at a perfect point, and setting up the next track perfectly.
The energy of the first track continues into “Decipher”, before you get exposed to the softer underbelly of Travo. They subtly showcase their more ambient melodic side as the track continues, first with the stripping back of the percussive and string layers to show off the synths, before the vocals dial back to a familiar, yet hard-to-place 90s- 00s grungy/proggy tone. This helps build a bit more structure to the track than the first, reigning in the jam, whilst still channelling a fuckload of energy and hype through the track.
Something else I’ve been yearning for too of late, is the synth-soaked interludes that I fell in love with from bands like Path of Might, and Travo absolutely delivered for me. “Silenced Soul” is a beautifully trippy interlude with a blend of sounds that could be plucked from a Twin Peaks magic mushroom trip, or a wander through Mass Effect 1’s Presidium. At two and a half minutes, it’s a brilliant break from the high intensity of Travo‘s insane sound, especially as they follow it up with arguably their most metallic and frenetic track of the album. Vocals are mixed up again, with Gonçalo’s melodic vocals this time pulling more from the hippie singers of the 60-70’s, a brilliant contrast against his harsh punky vocals that explode as the instruments do as well. The guitars in the track have an insane wah-wah sound to them, that matches the pace of the music brilliantly.
In “Sleeper”, it’s fair to say you can really spot, and wax lyrical about the change that makes Wasteland such a huge improvement over Astromorph God. The mixing and mastering is absolutely out of this world in comparison to their back catalogue, with the album produced, mixed, and mastered by Jaime Arellano (Ghost, Ulver, Behemoth) this time around. Around halfway through “Sleeper”, the sound drops away from the frenetic psych-punk, and into a cosmic trance of synths. I’ve spun this through countless headphones and surround sound systems, and it sounds like I’m floating through space every time, anywhere. As the music starts to build back up and layers are reintroduced or ramped up, you’ll appreciate the jaw-dropping clarity of each instrument as well as the impressive songwriting that makes each layer feel really meaningful, before Travo hit one of the best zeniths of the album. None of this would be possible however, if they didn’t have a mixer who can make each new peak sound larger than the next, even with such a constant frenetic pace to their music.
Wasteland is packed from start to finish with absolute rippers, despite being only seven tracks long. “Way Down” was one of the most surprising and unique tracks of the lot. Again using the grungier, “familiar” vocal style, this one deploys more traditional, emphatic hooks which get you really belting the lines out when played loud. This is what I’d call their gateway track; this will pull a wider array of punters into the sound. If they’ll hang around for the rest is anyone’s guess.
The title track picks up the almost positive-sounding vibes of “Way Down” and reverses course. An industrial introduction lays the foundation for one of the heaviest tracks of the record, the coarse vocals playing off brilliantly against frenetic drums and some really cool feedback-driven guitars. It’s like of Slomosa grabbed a bag of charlie and went to town. And to cap the album, Travo do what so many fail to, and decimate the listener with a proper closing track, that feeds off the energy from “Wasteland” and ramps it up.
What more is there to say, just that I hope that Wasteland propels Travo into a proper spotlight, and we see them on many more European tours. Their music perfectly intersects many genres for me, with elements of psych, prog, hardcore, industrial, rock, math, and more. Capped with the exceptionally good production on Wasteland, I think Travo will end up high up on albums of the year for people.
