Tru

Ovlov come from Newtown, Connecticut, and have broken up more than once. Tru, their second album, came out on Exploding in Sound on 20 July 2018, five years after Am. In between, Steve Hartlett put his songs into another project, Stove, and Ovlov came back slowly: a handful of shows, then Greatest Hits Vol. II, a 2017 collection of their early EPs. The title is less loaded than it looks. By Hartlett’s account, “TRU” was just a word the band kept saying at the time, the way “Am” had been.

The songs are older than the release date suggests. In July 2018 Hartlett told The Alternative that most were two or three years old and a couple went back six or seven years, to demos for the first record. Looking back in 2021, he placed most of Tru in 2016, the year his best friend died, after which, he said, he wrote a great deal. He demoed them in a friend’s room in Brooklyn. The album was recorded about a year and a half before it came out, with the work split between two engineers. Michael John Thomas III engineered five songs at Black Lodge in Brooklyn and mixed and mastered all nine. Jesse Weiss engineered the other four, with Alec and Jack Pombriant, and for those four Morgan Luzzi and Theo Hartlett recorded their vocals in what the credits call “Mr. & Mrs. Hartlett’s bedroom”.

The band is Hartlett on vocals and guitar, his younger brother Theo on drums, Luzzi on guitar and Michael Hammond Jr., Stove’s bassist, on bass. The credits move people around. Hartlett plays bass and synth on “The Best of You” while Hammond takes the guitar, Theo sings on “Stick”, and Erin McGrath adds vocals to the opener, “Baby Alligator”. “Spright”, the lead single in May, was the clearest change. Pitchfork’s track review took it as a song about getting healthier, sung without strain, and called it “a slower and softer version of Ovlov”. Stereogum, which premiered it, heard a song about time and about treating yourself and others better.

“Short Morgan”, the second single, is the song Hartlett keeps naming as his best, in 2018 and again in 2021. He told The Fader it is “about being alone and not knowing how to handle it”, credited Theo’s drumming with keeping it from going country-pop and called the solo in the middle his favourite. Pitchfork pointed out that its lyric runs as one continuous sentence. “Stick”, the third single, runs on what Pitchfork called a motorik rhythm, and Post-Trash singled out how its quiet passages jump to full noise and drop straight back. The closer, “Grab It From the Garden”, is the longest song by almost two minutes, at 6:10, and both Theo and Thomas take guitar solos on it.

The reviews were mostly warm, and Metacritic’s average of 86 counts as universal acclaim. AllMusic gave the album four and a half stars, and Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman, at 7.8, heard less Dinosaur Jr. than on Am and more early-’90s Sebadoh. Dinosaur Jr. came up in most of the reviews, and not always as praise. No Ripcord, at 8 out of 10, thought the solo on “Short Morgan” drifts too close to that band and that the atonal pile-up at the end of “Tru Punk” adds nothing. The same song was a highlight elsewhere: Spectrum Culture heard Midwest emo in it, and Post-Trash admired how little its arpeggios change. The Skinny, at three stars out of five, compared Hartlett’s soft voice to Ben Gibbard’s and thought the closer ran a couple of minutes long.

Tru is a good record that rarely surprises. Its strongest songs are compact ones, and the critics agreed on them: “Spright” at 2:40, “Short Morgan” at two minutes, “Stick” at 3:22. Around them the reference points are the ones most critics reached for, and Hartlett knows it. In 2021 he said “Short Morgan” came out without him trying to sound like anyone, “though I know it does sound like many people”. Where the band stretch out, as in the six minutes of the closer, The Skinny’s call for a trim is fair. Tru refines Am more than it moves past it. The move came later. “Land of Steve-O” and “Eat More”, demoed before Tru was released and left off for being too poppy, turned up in 2021 on Buds, the more pop-minded record that followed.