Because this band’s name is “Star Card”, and because I am a middle-aged tarot aficionado, I have chosen to frame this review of Star Card’s debut album, Trash World, through the lens of the meaning of the tarot card The Star. That card is number seventeen in the Major Arcana, and when upright, it represents hope and healing, renewal, and inspiration. Reversed, it can denote despondency, pessimism, and disconnection.
Much of what you’ll hear on Trash World sounds like it takes the card’s reversed meaning, but there’s a lot of inspiration behind this record. Their lo-fi grunge sound – paired with their penchant for throwing cards into the audience at shows – made them the talk of the underground punk scene a couple of years ago. On this record, released back in November 2025, that blistering style comes back in full force, channeling the best of their angst, darkness, and power.
Trash World is, in fact, the follow-up to the band’s 2023 EP Freak World, but founding members Calley Nelson (guitar/vocals/words) and Brendan Landis (drums) came up with the songs for both records at the same time. Where Freak World – self-released – showcased the more experimental tracks to introduce listeners to the band, Trash World took the more conventional tracks and added the finishing touches, taking time to make sure all the grime and grit ground against the eardrums just right.
The raw bedroom pop atmosphere bleeds through from the first note of the opening track “Flowers”, where room noise offers a hypnotic thread for the rest of the sounds to follow, from the dry and slow drums to Nelson’s voice warping as it delivers spoken word verses. The sounds continue to twist as Nelson sings in the chorus, “As you know, you will go, time slows.” A manifesto of loss and acceptance, “Flowers” introduces Trash World with a confessional, setting the vulnerable theme of the album right from the jump.
Then “Even The Sun Can Hurt You” offers a more conventional grunge sound, picking up the pace and delivering lyrics of reckless abandon against all better judgement (“She can’t hear it, she’s out drinking again/Won’t stop but can’t pay the rent/Nothing seems to scare her more than being alone/So when the collector calls, she picks up that phone”). On “Lena”, featuring a dope opening riff from Jackson Tarricone on bass, Nelson sings of a character embodying the spirit of the previous track, giving the middle finger to a world in which she has nothing left to lose but herself.
Nelson isn’t afraid to share personal missives through the lyrics, especially on tracks like “When You Want” and “Project The Pabst”, the latter being from the perspective of a stalker. The song “What It Feels Like To Be In Your Twenties” interpolates lines from Tears For Fears’ “Everybody Wants To Rule The World”: “So sad I think we almost made it/Too bad we really had to fade out”. It channels the waning feelings of invincibility and the crushing sense that life gets painful, and as adulthood creeps closer, no one will be there to save you but yourself.
And sometimes the lyrics take a backseat to the outpouring of musical catharsis, especially on “Oblique Strategies”, where the only phrase is “Everything I do, I do it for you” repeated eight times over blistering guitars.
The closing track, “Keep On Rocking In The Freak World,” comes from David Drucker, the mind behind NYC-based experimental project Painted Faces, a good friend of Nelson and Landis. Star Card’s grunged-up version of Drucker’s stripped-down original adds an anthemic layer, making it a defiant statement in the face of darkness and anything spiritually destructive: “Keep on rocking in the freak world/Everything happens for a reason/That’s what they say/I guess it’s okay”.
Trash World serves as an observation of taking things that go wrong, accepting that they happened and will happen, and trying to navigate them toward a better way of living. People will hurt you, and you will lose people through various means, and things will just get uncomfortable for many different reasons. The only thing to do is take those things and use them for personal growth, either as brush strokes or musical notes for art, blocks to build a new home, or rungs for a ladder to rise out of the darkness.
While Trash World may have a lot of grit and grime to it, the album’s bottom line is for the listener not to wallow in it. Rather, it speaks to the importance of working from the darkness, digging away at it to find inspiration towards something new, better, and hopeful. If that doesn’t evoke the meaning of The Star card, I don’t know what does.
Take a listen to “Lena” from Trash World below, and follow Star Card on Instagram to get their latest updates.
Written by Will Sisskind
