Iva Toric Releases “Trust Fall”
If harmony is indeed the cornerstone of every impactful indie rock performance as it’s been suggested by a lot of onlookers in the past couple of years, saying that the new single and lyric video from Iva Toric in “Trust Fall” is a hit waiting to pop off online might not be doing the material justice. The first element that smacks us in this track is the vocal harmony, wrapping around the hook like the instrumentation and Toric herself are as much the same as they are individual entities. The magic between the leading woman and her lush musical backdrop is endless in “Trust Fall,” to such an extent, I might add, that I was surprised this was her virgin major release upon hearing it the first time.
The lyrics in this song constantly touch on a desire to be free, to get out, the break away from the suffocation of the sublimely predictable, to the point of embodying a little bit of the anxious delivery we get from Toric around the one-minute mark. There’s a lot of angst in the refrain, but it’s entirely necessary to stress the point – after all, I think it’s obvious that we’re dealing with a hard rock songstress here who doesn’t want to beat around the bush but give us everything she has straight.
This vocal precision is something that I wish I heard from every artist in this genre who drops a record or a single these days, and I have a feeling that if it gets any tighter than it already is for this performance that it’s going to be difficult to keep the mainstream press from sniffing around Toric’s discography. Again, she’s only got a handful of songs and a lone album in her catalog at the moment, but in time, I can see the approach she’s taken for this specific performance working for her with a variety of different tempos and tonal foundations than what we find in “Trust Fall.”
The melodic backdrop is completely natural in this single, and I had a hard time locating any element in the song that I thought would qualify as plasticized or lacking soul in comparison to what you might hear on the FM dial contemporarily. There’s nothing unfeeling or unreal about “Trust Fall;” Iva Toric is being everything the smart alternative rock singers of 2022 have to be to break through to the primetime while also exhibiting a lot of raw confessions some of her peers are just too guarded about to exploit.
I love the look of this first studio work from Iva Toric, and if she keeps her nose to the grindstone I think she’s going to find herself quite the successful following as 2022 slowly inches toward 2023. With or without the effects of an inflated economy on live music, Toric is bringing us the intensity of a live performance in “Trust Fall” that I didn’t know anyone without a huge background could pull off until now. She’s going to be interesting to follow, and I think I speak for most of the critics around the underground when I say so.
Zachary Rush