Day Trippers
US rock band Thursday return to the limelight with one of the year’s most exceptional rock releases No Devolución. BRAD BARRETT endeavours to discover how Thursday managed to remain at the cutting edge…
G
eoff Rickly, singer and frontman of the post-hardcore rock band Thursday, walks into a diner for a pre-show dinner following soundcheck. The beleaguered, late twenties or early thirties serving staff member looks up and a look of recognition crosses his face. He strikes up conversation and excitedly announces his intention to attend the Thursday show that night. This type of encounter was repeated many times last year while Thursday toured the US playing their seminal second album Full Collapse in its entirety whilst celebrating 10 years since its original release. That his band can successfully tour album from a decade ago to young and older fans alike isn’t something that Geoff Rickley takes lightly, “We have a record that’s changed a certain group of people who were in music for a certain time
period...it changed all their lives,” Rickley seems slightly stunned at the notion, “The fact that we made a record like that and now it is 10 years later... it’s unreal, man. Unreal!” Thursday is a band that defined the post-hardcore blueprint and their later albums 2003’s War All The Time and 2009’s Common Existence left a lot for other bands to live up to. Things have changed, however, and the success of the nostalgic Full Collapse tour notwithstanding Thursday will have to pull something remarkable out of the bag if they still to be seen as a relevant
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musical force in today’s climate. No doubt aware of this, Thursday have been busy working on a new LP and are coming out all guns blazing... Written in seven days and recorded over several two week long periods with a month’s break between each, No Devolución is the band’s least protracted album in terms of time taken to create. In fact, they even confessed to ex-Mercury Rev member and producer Dave Fridmann that they were the most unprepared they’ve ever been going into the studio. “I didn’t write any of the songs on guitar,” says Geoff, who traditionally used the guitar as a tool for jotting down song ideas. Not this time. “When I would write songs on guitar, I would sit around for a long time and plan out a song in my head and then I would try and get the band to play it exactly how I imagined it. Even though I can’t play drums, I would have the drum part written and I’d try to hum it to Tucker (Rule, drummer). They’d humour me a bit. This time I didn’t have to do any of that so I’d be hearing these compositions just happening. I’d be in the room and it’d just be flowing and I’d already be writing lyrics.” Geoff was able to concentrate entirely on his role as lyricist and vocalist as his band, whose lineup has pretty much remained unchanged since 2001, pieced the music together faster than they’d ever done before.
“So, all morning they’d be writing and in the afternoon they’d be recording and by the time they were done recording – this would be a three to five hour process – I would have the lyrics finished! As soon as I’d finished them, I’d email them to our producer and walk into the booth and finish singing it and from morning to night we’d have a complete song with the vocals. I was singing something I had just written, it was fresh. I had never tried a demo
“No DevolucióN feels like we startiNg a whole New chapter for this baND.”
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