Trauma Kit are finding solidarity in a state built to divide them

It could be said that Trauma Kit’s story began with teenagers smoking weed and freestyling in a $100 Dodge Shadow, the subwoofer loud enough to feel the bass in their bones. Or perhaps it started in a condemned Victorian mansion where they threw a party with Show Me The Body, the chandeliers threatening to fall from the ceiling. But really, it started long before them – it started with Idaho. People lived and died violently for their land, and from that bad seed came a remarkable fruit: artists who waited for no one, would not leave and rallied a community to create something that was entirely their own. If you build it, they will come.Trauma Kit is a product of these strange ways and an increasingly strange world. Describing themselves as “Boise noise-punk exhibitionists”, the four-piece are like a game of exquisite corpse – each member challenging and contradicting the others to push their sound to the furthest extremity. Mason Waters, the band’s frontman, cuts an intensely physical presence onstage; hair shaved to the skin, startlingly pale against the dark as he paces and practically crackles with charged energy. His one-two punch of rap and hardcore vocals storm against the mu...