Trusselina to Announce Debut EP THE POINT'S A TRUSS, MY TRUSSELINA

Newly formed experimental pop project Trusselina has announced their debut EP, The Point's a Truss, My Trusselina, due out October 9th via Jolt Music. The duo consists of Mikaela Oppenheimer and Hayden McGarvey, who both come from indie-rock backgrounds—Oppenheimer on bass in alternative-rock band Hello Mary and McGarvey on drums for shoegaze outfit Bleary Eyed. Their debut EP as Trusselina draws from a wide range of surprising influences, such as Enya, Fiona Apple, Gastr del Sol and Nine Inch Nails, combining genres like electronica, folk, glitch and noise into a sound that feels distinctive and ever-shifting.

Along with the announcement, Trusselina also shared the EP's lead single, 'The Club.' The track centers around a bubbly acoustic guitar riff, jittery drums, and Hayden McGarvey's pitch-shifted vocals. 'The lyrics are about being sneaky and feeling guilty,' McGarvey jokes.

Trusselina is currently touring the East Coast and Midwest, including dates in NYC, Philadelphia and more.

More About The Point's a Truss, My Trusselina

Mikaela Oppenheimer and Hayden McGarvey met on the road during a joint Hello Mary/Bleary Eyed tour back in 2024. They were immediately drawn to each other's shared tastes and natural openness to creative experimentation. A comp-sci major at Bard College, Oppenheimer's solo music projects were heavily influenced by coding. She would sort algorithms on notes to make randomized melodies and became obsessed with taking field recordings around her school's wooded campus in the Hudson Valley. When McGarvey wasn't drumming with Bleary Eyed, he would use a tape deck to record beats in his bedroom, resampling his voice and guitar back and forth. McGarvey sent a track he had recorded like this, 'Rev,' to Oppenheimer after he accidentally played it backwards on his tape deck and felt inspired by the error. 'I had made it a few months before, and during that tour I started to realize the sound I wanted to dive into with this stuff,' McGarvey recounts. Deep in this whirl of inspiration, McGarvey returned home and immediately recorded versions of all the tracks on The Point's a Truss, My Trusselina. Months later, Oppenheimer visited McGarvey in Philly (she was living in NYC at the time), and the EP became fully realized with both musicians performing on the songs.

The EP's opening track 'Trusselina Archimboldi' begins with Oppenheimer reading aloud a passage from Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, describing a circus performer, Frau Mann, who moved 'as if the air, by its very lightness, by its very non-resistance, were an almost insurmountable problem.' Cloud-like pad chords float above Oppenheimer's voice, which scrambles and pitch-shifts as samples and textures crescendo and then resolve into euphoric breakbeat. Frau Mann feels like an apt embodiment of Trusselina's sound, both marked by a sense of whimsy and strange beauty. In 'Gastro,' spare, pretty elements from acoustic guitar and simple vocal melodies become twisted beyond recognition through distortion, frantic drum samples, and jolts of digital detritus. Lead single 'The Club' centers around a bubbly acoustic guitar riff and McGarvey's auto-tuned vocals that at one point lilt 'I've got a secret/ Like splicing two weird animals.' It's a fitting analogy for how Trusselina samples throughout their EP, sounds cut up and mish-mashed in ways that feel both uncanny and humorous. Recordings of yodelling, a text-to-speech reader, and mouth noises from the website 'Wide-Band WebSD,' all find a place here. At times, listening to Trusselina feels akin to the joys of scrolling through a web archive, and in particular that happenstance, surprising moment when you find something deeply moving, funny, or weird.

Between the Hello Mary/Bleary Eyed tour and Oppenheimer joining McGarvey in Philly, she texted him about feeling sad to be so far away, how helpless she felt, and specifically, in her words, how she 'can't drive and can't lift stuff.' As if it were the only possible response, McGarvey replied with a recording of a song titled that very same phrase. 'It made me feel so much better and so seen and lovely,' Oppenheimer recounts. This co-conspiratorial mix of silliness and sweetness runs through every part of the EP. It's there in the hodgepodge of noise, cartoonish synths, and indeed also in its title, The Point's a Truss, My Trusselina. 'It's a sentence someone could say to a loved one to cheer them up,' the band says. 'It's basically what you say when someone is totally missing the point, but you understand and have been there yourself.'

Trusselina - The Point's a Truss, My Trusselina
Release Date: October 9th, 2026
Label: Jolt Music

Tracklist

1. Trusselina Archimboldi

2. Gastro

3. The Club

4. fun times at the

5. Kiss your Momma doves flying

6. cant drive cant lift stuff

7. Enya Remix

8. Rev

Credits