The Trinitones, College’s resident all-male acapella group, have only grown in worldwide popularity since the group’s founding in 2012. Coming off a recent tour of the United States (including, but not limited to, the singing of the US national anthem at Yankee Stadium), the lads are now back in Dublin and back to business. After dozens of singles, they are set to release their debut album on September 19th.
Trinitones Volume One (the “likely” title of the album) will quickly follow the group’s upcoming performance at Electric Picnic on August 31st. The performance as well as the group’s recent single, a fitting rendition of the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody”, are no doubt building hype for the upcoming album.
“So we’ve been meaning to put [‘Everybody’] on Spotify for a long time”, explained Aengus Gilligan, a senior Trinitones member and a masters music and media tech student. “The soloist is someone who’s left the group a couple of years ago. But our goal, with all our kind of the tracks we put on, is to keep the original soloist, since it’s kind of their song.”
The Trinitones take respect for one another’s creative space very seriously, to the point where, despite having the means to hire professional musicians and record producers, they always keep their operation in-house. Their latest album, according to the group, was in large part produced by former Trinitone Johnny Mason, who holds a degree in sound engineering.
“It also gives it a kind of personal touch with all our arrangements being done by the group”, said Matthew Harbourne, another senior Trinitone in 4th year medicine. “We don’t get anybody outside … So even across the whole album, there’s a good range of and we have four or five different arrangers so you can kind of see the different things that people like to bring up.”
Having the ability to keep their identity despite working in the inherently rendition-based genre of acapella is no small feat in and of itself. The Trinitones find a way, however, and manage to keep their humour throughout.
“Whenever the songs are arranged, you might even have an inside joke, like, if you’re listening very closely, like, we’ll say somebody’s name,” said Harbourne.
Despite the cheeky nature of their approach to song lyrics, the Trinitones usually draw the line at explicit lyrics, even if they are in the original song. To Matthew and Aengus, who bounced off each other in our interview like they were in one of the famous riff-off scenes from Pitch Perfect, this was only “so the whole album wouldn’t get tanked with an explicit.”
Thereby limited by wanting “cleaner” songs, The two Trinitones delved deeper into how they selected the songs that would grace what would likely be their final big project for the group.
“We’re not going to put on a niche song that people don’t really know, you know.” said Aengus and Matthew again together. “Like, what would people like to listen to? Like, if I was listening to an acapella album, what would I want to hear? I wouldn’t want to hear a niche song. I’d want a song that I know, but still it’s a bit of us. It’s songs we like. It’s the ones we have the most fun singing. There’s no one on the album there, which, like, we didn’t enjoy before and it’s kind of new and feels fresh and exciting.”
And so the album came to be, through the contribution of dozens and usually within the recording studios in House 5 or even in member’s houses. All with the help of Mason, who, to the two Trinitones, is “only getting better and better”.
With the “personality” added by Mason and the “feeding off each other’s energy” that Aengus says fuels the group’s recording process, it seems not altogether unlikely that the Trinitones are headed towards another bout of viral internet fame, similar to that which came about after their rendition of Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls”.
Trinitones Volume One will include modern popular favourites including, but not limited to, “Please Please Please” by Sabrina Carpenter, “Dreams” by the Cranberries, and “Budapest” by George Ezra.
