Laura Jane Grace in The Trauma Tropes - Adventure Club (Album Review)
Friday, 18 July 2025
Written by Maddy Howell
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
By now, Laura Jane Grace has proven she can write vital, visceral punk songs anywhere, but even might not have expected a whole record to emerge from a delayed flight and a deep dive into the Greek scene. But that’s exactly what happened to spur ‘Adventure Club’ into being.
Her latest venture began as a brief trip to Athens in early 2024 to record a one-off track for a short film on behalf of the Onassis Foundation. While there, Grace quickly found herself embedded in a vibrant swirl of local punks, and the Trauma Tropes project was born out of a spontaneous collaboration with wife Paris Campbell Grace and new Athens-based friends Jacopo Fokas and Orestis Lagadinos. It’s a happy accident of a record that finds Grace at her most gloriously liberated.
Fuelled by a sense of camaraderie, there are many moments on ‘Adventure Club’ that feel utterly defiant. Apocalyptic opener WWIII Revisited is a razor-edged anti-war anthem delivered with snarling fury, while power-pop cut Mine Me Mine spits at capitalist greed.
Clear standout Your God (God’s Dick) picks apart religious hypocrisy in hilarious style, and the incendiary Fuck You Harry Potter, inspired by a pub encounter with an inebriated Englishman, offers up a powerful meditation on identity and how others see us.
Tackling a whole host of big ideas across its 28-minute runtime, from international conflict to addiction and grief, fury and self-deprecation lead the way, but that rage and doubt is often undercut with sly humour and radical joy.
Take Espresso Freddie, for example, a giddy tribute to Freddo espresso, a locals-only iced coffee topped with whipped milk that proved the band's fuel of choice during writing. Then, there’s Wearing Black, an ode to being the sole monochrome-clad goth amid the glitter and rainbows of a Pride parade. There’s plenty of fun to be found here.
Walls’ sombre reflections on isolation bring things to a bleak close, but it’s a fitting reminder of where it all began. An often joyous and gloriously messy celebration of punk as both resistance and release, ‘Adventure Club’ is one of Grace’s best solo efforts yet. Complete, confident, and compelling, it’s a reminder of the accidental magic that takes hold when the right people find each other in the right place at the right time.
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