7/10

The Plastic Waste Band have spent much of their career exploring what it means to create art in a world steadily damaging itself. And on their third album 'Trash Island', the Montreal quartet takes that concern to its most ambitious conclusion, imagining humanity stranded on a floating mass of plastic after the rest of the planet has become uninhabitable.

It's a concept substantial enough to overwhelm the music beneath it. Yet across ten tracks, the band avoids turning ecological anxiety into a rigid lecture or an overly solemn exercise. Instead, 'Trash Island' treats apocalypse as a setting for collective improvisation, surreal humour and moments of unexpected beauty.

Opening track ‘Chant de Mars’ establishes that approach through patience, as a restrained saxophone melody gradually climbs through an irregular rhythmic framework, building towards a climax whose force comes from the length of the journey preceding it. The band keep us slightly unsettled throughout, using shifting metre to ensure that even the quieter sections never feel entirely secure.

The album’s environmental premise is serious, but its titles reveal a refusal to treat catastrophe with unbroken gravity. ‘Dream Cake’, ‘Bear Awareness’, ‘Nose Prose’ and ‘Inner Gimbal’ suggest fragments of a strange new culture forming amid the debris. These eccentric details make the imagined world feel inhabited rather than merely symbolic.

‘If You See This It’s a Sign’ and ‘North of the North Pole’ broaden the album’s sense of geography and dislocation. Place has become unstable, familiar boundaries have shifted, and the survivors appear to be navigating a world where conventional maps no longer offer much assistance. The music reflects that uncertainty, repeatedly moving away from obvious structures without losing its underlying direction.

While lead single ‘WasToBe’ brings a more immediate energy to the record, showcasing the band’s ability to combine heavy rhythmic momentum with open-ended instrumental conversation. The track’s title carries its own sense of loss, suggesting a future interrupted or an identity that never had the opportunity to form completely.

In all, 'Trash Island' is an ambitious, unpredictable and darkly playful album from a band increasingly comfortable with its own contradictions. It's heavy without remaining oppressive, experimental without losing emotional purpose, and politically aware without reducing itself to slogans.

Here, The Plastic Waste Band imagine the end of the world as one final, fiercely inventive ensemble performance among the ruins.