Ruth in the Bardo’s forthright politics shine in new genre-fluid album

Ruth in the Bardo‘s third album You’re Not Missing the Mark, You’re Missing the Point. is one you listen to with headphones on, barely acknowledging what’s in front of you as your mind wanders. After a while, it starts to feel like a movie score, and working out exactly which movie it’s scoring is part of the experience.

And, it’s got bite.

Ruth in the Bardo is a band occupying an uncanny vacancy—both in the local DIY scene and in music writ large—that we all overlooked.

Vocalist and guitarist Ruth Trupiano, bassist and vocalist Ash Hoffman, drummer Dorothia Aurora, and guitarist Tyler McConnell—four West Philly 20-something noise-, post-punk-, and jazz-circuited musicians—comprise the band. And in their eyes, they just released the album.

Something that stands out almost immediately about the record is Trupiano’s voice. The tones she chooses—when to be airy, when to be scratchy and harsh, when to pull back and then explode—are self-possessed and can drive those trying to understand the music insane. Her choice to match the melody and rhythm of her voice with the guitar parts in “Coffin Song” points to willful experimentation and risk-taking throughout the new album.

“There are imperfect moments that we decided to keep in the album because we wanted it to sound insanely human,” she said. “I really wanted to sound like it was alive and breathing.”

“PPD” stands out to the West Philly foursome because they introduced solos, McConnell’s whimsical electric guitar style and Hoffman’s smooth bass delivery define the song. It’s on the slower side, is heavily influenced by jazz, and has a desert rock vibe. The tension seethes in Trupiano’s voice as she describes being hit in the head by a cop but still knowing she “got off easy.”

Dorothia’s drumming—uniquely part 2000s hip-hop and hardcore—is like lightning in a bottle. Her style drives both “PPD” and “Fisgador,” at times with unbridled certainty. The heaviness she brings to the band energizes them.

Trupiano broadly experiments stylistically in “Fisgador,” the third track on You’re Not Missing the Mark, You’re Missing the Point. It’s structured like orchestral movements, from dreamy, reverberating strums and bard-like hushed vocals to swells of noise and distortion. The track features polyrhythmic music breaks, each an experiment in improv jazz, sudden tempo changes, and plot progression.

“It’s a track that took a lot of tries. It originally was more of a slowcore track that evolved into whatever it is now,” she said. “It’s two songs in one about the same thing in different ways. The first section’s a fable about the damning path of a squandered life of hate leading to a lonely, abject death. The second half is instrumental. It’s supposed to feel like the present moment of collapse, I think.”

Ruth in the Bardo | Photos courtesy of the band

Trupiano knew she wanted her writing to be political, and You’re Not Missing the Mark, You’re Missing the Point. continues to shape her political voice and Ruth in the Bardo as a whole. A family member’s fatal overdose and her gender identity ingrained politics into her writing early on.

“There’s an aspect of being transgender where there’s a kind of implicit death that occurs and then a rebirth through transition, so maybe you lose everything when you come out, a lot of people do,” Trupiano said and described this liminal and transitional state of being borrowed from being “in the Bardo”, a Buddhist concept. “So there’s this kind of social political death that occurs when you start the process of becoming.”

Being “in the Bardo” is the concept of a liminal state of existing that lies between death and rebirth, hence the band name.

“It’s hard to walk out of your door every day and feel judgment. I didn’t have a supportive family. I didn’t really have a lot of those things,” Trupiano said. “So I think ultimately the goal of writing about heavy stuff is so that if there’s like one trans person in the South or in the Midwest that hears it and feels they’re not alone in their experiences, that would be enough. For me, to make people feel held in that way, I think it’s a political act.”

Ruth in the Bardo put great intention into voicing issues that affect their daily lives, friends and fellow musicians on You’re Not Missing the Mark, You’re Missing the Point.

“I feel like it has made us really musically strong because we all have, like, a trust and a commitment together,” Hoffman said, noting the band has developed strong friendships along the way.

“I needed people who were going to be brave about it. I feel like that’s what’s kind of come to pass, that everyone’s been artistically brave and forthright,” Trupiano said. “It makes me want to keep investing more of my life.”

Ruth in the Bardo started in Trupiano’s teenage bedroom in South Carolina. There, with her acoustic guitar, she wrote enough songs to fill albums. Her writing focused on grief she experienced when they were younger both through losing a family member to drugs and navigating life as a trans person. 

Trupiano found moxie like hers in others such as Hoffman, an aspiring cellist and bass player in the high school’s jazz band, who said they played a lot of music “at each other” during that time. 

In 2018, Trupiano decided that Ruth in the Bardo was more than a bedroom project, and started releasing music at 17, all DIY. She wrote, recorded, mixed, and mastered asking for a friend on Bandcamp, 10 songs inspired by lo-fi indie rock acts such as starry cat and mid-2010s YouTube algorithm core.

The following year, Trupiano and friend Sam Fenner played the first Ruth in the Bardo show. The two released i met him & we spoke, a live charity album, the same year and in early 2021 moved into a West Philly punk house. Wept, which dropped a few months after the move, was about that evolution and Trupiano’s fallout with Fenner.

Trupiano easily made friends with musicians in the basement show paradise that is West Philly.

“I was really quickly introduced into the punk [scene], the silly shit that was going on here, and it really influenced me,” Trupiano said. “I’d already started listening to [They Are Gutting A Body Of Water] from their first record. I heard it in 2019, and I was like, wow, what!?”

Hoffman went to Florida to study electronic music production after high school and musically linked back up with Trupiano in Philly in 2023.

A four-piece Ruth in the Bardo made up entirely of South Carolina expats, released Ars Poetica in July 2023. The record introduced electronic elements to Ruth in the Bardo’s sound, as Trupiano had been DJing outdoor raves during the pandemic. For Trupiano, the album was meant to mark a shift from being largely a solo project to a full band. Writing the record, though, proved the band’s current lineup wasn’t going to work out.

Trupiano felt the solo version and her desired full-band version of Ruth in the Bardo were at odds during the writing process of Ars Poetica.

“Ars Poetica is when I thought I knew myself, but I kinda really didn’t. This new record is, I think, why I’m pushing: it is everything that I’ve ever wanted to make. I feel like these paths were more like clawing at something that I couldn’t figure out, and now this new one kind of figured it out a little bit,” Trupiano quantified.

Trupiano then met McConnell from behind a drum kit in Lola.5, and met Aurora playing “drunk soccer.”

“We played adult intramural soccer. And we got really close,” Aurora confessed sarcastically.

“It’s more like getting absolutely wasted and falling around and playing soccer kind of vibe,” Trupiano added with a chuckle.

Aurora, who had been playing in bands since middle school in her hometown outside of Philly, eagerly joined the band in late 2024. According to her, she was already a fan before joining.

The band as it stands now truly began to take shape at that time and took off in February 2025. “We started with a meeting instead of playing. We wanted to set intentions of what we were going to do and have a shared vision because we really wanted to do it right,” Hoffman said. “I’ve learned so much over the years from playing with different people and brought all of that into this project. I think this album is like a fruition.”

Ruth in the Bardo spent the rest of 2025 playing shows and writing You’re Not Missing the Mark, You’re Missing the Point. They recorded demos in each other’s bedrooms and practiced in a West Philly garage only accessible by hopping a wraparound porch bannister, like an urban version of The Secret Garden, then were forced to lay down album cuts at Port Richmond’s Mindreader Recordings after Trupiano’s laptop died.

On a sticky July night, Trupiano, Hoffman, Aurora, and McConnell sat next to each other on porch furniture, swatting at mosquitoes and talking over the sound of cars hitting potholes and the trolley bell. They joked about putting the abbreviated version of the album title YNMTMYMTP lengthy album name on a T-shirt and credited Philly band Hop Along while excitedly discussing what Ruth in the Bardo’s next moves are.

“Everyone is playing to the vision of what we’ve all kind of decided it to be, even maybe without talking about it as much, you know, just like that kind of specter that floats around the room when you’re in that kind of artistic collaborative mode,” Trupiano said of the new record. “It’s just stronger in this iteration.”

Ruth in the Bardo will be touring this fall, closing the run with a Sept. 19 show at Minimart here in Philly. Julia’s War, the band’s current label, is coordinating the release of 100 cassettes, as well. Trupiano already has more songs written and said to expect a new album next summer.