Carnival, the new EP from trauma ray, finds the Fort Worth band capturing some of their strongest, most intense, and exploratory work within the boundaries of a whirlwind year. The breakout success of Chameleon, their 2024 debut on Dais Records, further established trauma ray amidst the current wave of shoegaze revivalists, yet increasingly agile, able to weave between scenes, touring throughout 2025 with the likes of Deafheaven, Loathe, and Touché Amoré. A confluence of blitzing riffs and stark beauty, their sound continues to evolve, nodding to loud-quiet-loud greats across metal, grunge, and shoegaze from Slowdive to Smashing Pumpkins. Carnival delves into moodier, more cerebral material, like holding their past excursions against a funhouse mirror. There’s a distinct sense of unease in these songs, built as a band in a fleeting window of time, proving they work best under pressure and when pulling from the darkest corners of their subconscious.

“When Chameleon came out, we just never stopped touring. We’re driving ourselves, so it’s not like we have some situation where we can sit in a van and write,” explains Jonathan Perez, who moved to San Diego after returning from recent Deafheaven dates, adding to the challenge of getting the band all in one room. They used a break in the summer 2025 schedule to regroup in Texas for a few days, recording a flurry of tracks, then sent them to Corey Coffman for mixing and mastering. “At first I thought this was gonna be really bad and rushed, and now I feel like it might be my favorite thing we’ve ever done,” Perez says. “It’s the most collaborative we’ve been, where everyone was both hands-on and hands-off,” adds Uriel Avila. “You can really hear each person’s influences in almost every song in a very unique, non-biting way.” Avila and Perez, the band’s core songwriting duo to date, welcomed more contributions from others, notably an eerier strain of rhythmic and textural ideas from guitarist Coleman Pruitt. The direction coincided with a growing sense of collective dread and anxiety, and a striking photo set of a deserted amusement park near Brighton, England, taken on tour by drummer Nicholas Bobotas and now featured as the artwork. “It really looks like we specifically chose this theme and like had this whole preconceived idea, but it truly appeared out of like thin air,” says Perez.

The wordless “Carousel” ushers in the EP’s unsettling atmosphere with blasts of static and downcast strums giving way to “Hannibal”, an anthemic track packed with power riffs and raw emotion. The band has hit this kind of sheer power before, from 2018’s “Solstice” to Chameleon’s title track, while “Hannibal” contorts with a tinge of unprecedented evil, slithery, “Stone Temple-y, Alice in Chains-y,” Avila quips. Lyrically, he taps into teenage angst, the feeling of being dissected and rejected.

“Méliès”, named after the French illusionist and filmmaker Georges Méliès, cuts between heavy, sludgy chords and a skyward chorus, “from something scary to like a dream state,” says Avila, who channels the namesake’s surreal abstraction. His lines detail “being stuck in your head and just making up realities that probably aren’t the real thing going on, when you don’t want to face the truth.” “Funhouse” dips into doom metal, with sparse guitar work and possibly the band’s slowest ever BPM, as self-proclaimed Sleep-heads. Lyrics play with shifting perspectives, culminating in the call-and-response outro (“take my hand / this is not your wonderland”) that conjures two forces, or frames of mind, at odds with one another.

In contrast, the final track “Clown” jolts, flashes, and pummels, like the listener has come out the other end of a house of horrors, now fully immersed in the jarring, disorienting lights of the carnival. Personified by a knotty, synthy lead guitar squall — “the lead tone is something I’m super proud of, we’ve never had something like that in a trauma ray song,” per Perez — “Clown” reminds them of Robin Williams, an archetype of tragic happiness, how the people trying the hardest to make others laugh may privately be the saddest. Sonically, the band is quick to credit the influence of “Undone” and “Stuck on You” by ’90s cult favorite Failure, alongside the omnipresent Loveless, which gets to the greatness of trauma ray: five musicians absorbing, synthesizing, and expanding on what they love. Carnival offers a brief and highly loopable detour into darkness from a band growing more formidable by the mile.