On their third album ‘Trash Island’, Montreal’s The Plastic Waste Band imagine humanity confined to a floating mass of plastic after the rest of the planet has become uninhabitable. It’s a deliberately exaggerated premise, but one that gives the group a useful framework through which to examine ecological anxiety, collective responsibility and the strange routines that might persist even after catastrophe.
Released through Protomaterial Records and Elastic Recordings, the ten-track album continues themes that have been present throughout the band’s work to date. Their self-titled 2017 debut supported environmental conservation charities, while ‘Crushed’ and the subsequent ‘Revelations’ EP considered the difficulty of creating beauty within a culture increasingly aware of its own destructive habits.
‘Trash Island’ develops those concerns through a combination of psychedelic rock, jazz composition and group improvisation. Electric guitar, saxophone, acoustic bass and drums form the core of the sound, with the musicians moving between tightly organised passages and more open interactions.
Opening track ‘Chant de Mars’ introduces the record gradually. A relatively simple saxophone phrase develops within an irregular metre, climbing slowly as the surrounding arrangement becomes more forceful. The track’s eventual climax is effective because the band resists reaching it too quickly, allowing repetition and rhythmic instability to generate pressure.
While earlier single ‘WasToBe’ presents a more immediate side of the group, bringing heavier guitar textures into contact with jazz-informed interplay. Its title suggests something interrupted or unrealised, fitting naturally within an album concerned with futures altered by human behaviour.
Comparisons between Led Zeppelin and the John Coltrane Quartet help indicate the band’s combination of volume and exploratory playing, though ‘Trash Island’ is generally more interested in the tension between those traditions than in closely resembling either one.
The album’s conceptual ambition is substantial, but The Plastic Waste Band largely avoids explaining it too directly through the music. There are no obvious attempts to imitate disaster or translate every track into a specific narrative event. Instead, the record builds an atmosphere of instability and adaptation, allowing us to form our own relationship with its imagined world.
This approach is particularly effective across the later tracks, where the initial premise becomes less important than the behaviour of the ensemble. By then, the floating island functions as both a physical setting and a metaphor for the accumulated consequences, habits and materials that societies struggle to escape.
The result is a thoughtful and carefully paced album that uses ecological collapse as the foundation for a broader exploration of anxiety, absurdity and collective survival. The Plastic Waste Band’s strongest moments come when concept and performance remain in balance, allowing the seriousness of the subject to emerge without overwhelming the music.