As much as some folks in the industry might tell you otherwise, you can’t overstate the importance of the studio cuts that come after the first few you attach your name to, and I think Iva Toric was thinking about this when she recorded her new effort “Trust Fall” just recently. As a single, there’s nothing unconventional about the way this song has been produced, but from an aesthetical point of view, it’s got heart and emotional presence unlike most of the alternative rock and post-grunge I’ve been listening to this past summer and early fall. Iva Toric is playing for keeps, and she wants us to know it here.
The brooding execution we get from the woman at the mic is one element of the allure in “Trust Fall,” while the other is the potent chemistry she has with the backing band. Every player in the master mix is contributing something to the narrative akin to a verse, making the narrative – and even the hook that ties it together – sound like more of a collective effort than something born of singularity altogether. That’s not the most common look I find in content from artists of any genre, let alone one as typically self-serving as the contemporary hard pop/rock scene can be.
Toric’s voice feels almost surrounded – bombarded, even – by the instrumental forces around her, but this isn’t enough to throw off her general focus with the lyricism at all. Every act in this arrangement sounds pretty deliberate, to such an extent that I think this singer wanted to have a little more intensity bearing down on her voice than the average pop singer would in the same scenario. She’s certainly giving us an ace performance here, and it makes me wonder just how much charisma she would have in a live setting with nothing to hold her or her band back.
I love how ambitiously Iva Toric throws herself into the path of this ferocious hook in “Trust Fall,” and because of her willingness to get her hands dirty, the soulfulness of her words becomes even harder for us to ignore. She isn’t waiting for a synthetic element to bridge the normal gap between a rock musician and her core audience – she’s putting everything she’s organically got into the fever pitch of this song and running with it, which is something that I can only wish a lot of her contemporaries would try doing in their own work.
“Trust Fall” isn’t just a solid new track from an artist who I think all of us need to keep on our radars in 2022; it’s a fine way of getting to know who Iva Toric is, what her dreams are, and how she’s planning on putting them together in the months and years ahead of her. Optimism sits on the horizon of this single and its lyric video, and if we’re to take anything away from the story being told here, it’s that Iva Toric isn’t going to rest until she finds the catharsis the rock n’ roll community have been lacking in recent times.
Heather Savage