Album Review: Tramhaus — The First Exit (Subroutine Records)

Formed in Rotterdam during the diseased stillness of 2020, Tramhaus has spent several years building an explosive live reputation. Their September 2024 debut album, The First Exit, makes selfhood a construction site. Rotterdam is used here as a method. You hear it in the port-city restlessness of the arrangements, in the rough grace with which the band moves in songs that are built from social pressure. Like Algiers at their most urgent, Tramhaus treat songs as crowded social spaces. The album sounds communal, tense, and mobile. On April 17, 2026, Tramhaus returns to Romania at Control Club.

The album opens with "The Cause," where a muffled drum roll expands outward until vocalist Lukas Jansen shouts, "It seems like everyone is blind". The guitars of Nadya van Osnabrugge and Micha Zaat switch between tectonic patience and sudden devastating clarity. Julia Vroegh's bass provides a low-end gravitational pull. "Once Again," the album's measured second track, captures the governing mood. Jansen sings "make yourself comfortable, it's gonna be a ride / the pre, main and after courses right in front of your eyes," and what sounds initially like sardonic social observation reveals itself to be the voice of someone deciding that exposure is the only honest option. "We will gobble up just anything / we're all sincere" lands as a confession about performative sincerity. Where most contemporary post-punk records treat tension as its own reward, Tramhaus put affect back into its form.

The First Exit works most powerfully as a queer coming-of-age record, though it never reduces queerness to a slogan. It moves through the songs as exposure, code, memory, shame, flirtation, and pride. "A Necessity" carries the album's most direct self-articulation, Jansen delivering "disguised myself in camouflage, ruined it by being loud / naked, cold, still wet, I'm done with living like someone else". A taut, almost danceable bass line moves beneath guitars. Here, the old loud-quiet grammar associated with Preoccupations finds a sharper, more contemporary use.

Jansen writes in detail about puncturing before explaining. Roland Barthes used the term 'punctum' to describe the sudden wound inflicted by an image. These songs achieve something similar. On the shoegaze-adjacent "Semiotics," the album's midpoint, desire is now a crisis of reading. Jansen sings, "and then I spot the chain, spot the keychain on your jeans / while I try to find out if you know what it means". In this image, we hear the same fragile voltage as we see in Andrew Haigh’s Weekend, where recognition moves through tiny gestures long before it declares itself in language. Here, the whole nervous intelligence of queer public life opens up, the minor emblem that becomes an entire world. By the closing, "Past Me," Jansen delivers the album's most resolving lines, "Forced to shy away / No time for paranoia / Attempt to stay sane / It's getting harder to stay sane".

What The First Exit understands is that becoming happens in rooms, in the chest cavity. Rotterdam was rebuilt on land cleared by the devastation of World War II. Its landscape of modern architecture now feels like the only honest response to such ruin. Tramhaus do the same thing. The specific, sweating, still-unfinished weight of a life pressing forward into its own shape is the record's achievement. The sound of someone finding out, with some relief and considerable volume, that the walking itself was always the thing.