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**Trust - TRST**
★★★★☆

In the murky depths of Toronto's underground music scene circa 2010, Robert Alfons was crafting something altogether more sinister than his peers. While the city's indie darlings were busy perfecting their jangly guitar pop, Alfons retreated into the shadows, armed with vintage synthesizers and a vision that owed more to early Depeche Mode than Death Cab for Cutie. The result was TRST, a debut that announced the arrival of Trust with all the subtlety of a midnight prowler tapping at your bedroom window.

Alfons had been kicking around Toronto's music circles for years, playing in various indie outfits that never quite caught fire. But Trust represented something of a rebirth – a deliberate shedding of skin that saw him embrace the darker corners of electronic music. The moniker itself, with its vowel-starved spelling, suggested an artist uninterested in making things easy for anyone, least of all himself.

TRST is an uncompromising slab of darkwave that feels like it was beamed in from some alternate 1982 where Joy Division never split and the Berlin Wall cast longer shadows. Alfons deploys his arsenal of analog synths like weapons of mass seduction, crafting soundscapes that are simultaneously glacial and pulsing with barely contained menace. His vocals, processed through enough reverb to fill a cathedral, hover somewhere between Ian Curtis's baritone moan and the whispered confessions of a digital age penitent.

The album opens with "Bulbform," a track that immediately establishes Trust's modus operandi. Skeletal drum machines march in lockstep while synthesizers spiral upward like smoke from some unholy incense burner. Alfons's vocals emerge from the mix like a ghost materializing in fog, delivering lyrics that read like fragments of overheard conversations in empty nightclubs. It's a masterclass in atmosphere, setting the tone for everything that follows.

"Candy Walls" stands as perhaps the album's most immediate triumph, marrying an insistent, almost danceable pulse to Alfons's most melodically engaging vocal performance. The track builds with the inexorable logic of a fever dream, layers of synthesizers weaving in and out of focus while the rhythm section maintains its hypnotic throb. It's the closest thing to a conventional song on an album that seems allergic to convention, yet it never feels like a compromise.

Equally compelling is "Shoom," which strips the sound down to its barest elements – a simple drum pattern, a few well-placed synth stabs, and Alfons's voice floating through the mix like a transmission from another dimension. The minimalism is deceptive; every element feels precisely calibrated to maximum effect. It's electronic music that understands the power of space and silence, letting each sound breathe before the next one arrives.

"Dressed for Space" ventures into even more abstract territory, with field recordings and found sounds creating an unsettling backdrop for Alfons's most experimental vocal work. The track feels less like a song than a sonic short story, complete with narrative arc and emotional resolution. It's the kind of piece that rewards headphone listening and reveals new details with each encounter.

The production throughout TRST is deliberately lo-fi, with a warmth that suggests these tracks were recorded in some abandoned warehouse rather than a sterile studio environment. There's a tactile quality to the sound that makes the synthetic feel oddly organic, as if these machines have developed their own form of consciousness.

More than a decade on, TRST feels like a small miracle – a debut that arrived fully formed and uncompromising, owing nothing to prevailing trends or commercial considerations. While Trust would go on to refine and expand the sound on subsequent releases, there's something pure about this initial statement that remains compelling. It's an album that helped establish darkwave as a viable contemporary genre rather than mere nostalgic pastiche.

In an era where electronic music often feels either overly polished or deliberately primitive, TRST occupies a middle ground that feels both timeless and utterly of its moment. It's the sound of one artist's singular vision realized without compromise, a reminder that the most interesting music often emerges from the margins rather than the mainstream.