Geoff Rickly of Thursday talks to Stereoboard about New Album ‘No Devolucion’ (Interview)
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
Written by Rob Sleigh
“It feels like more of an English record than anything we’ve done before,” says Thursday vocalist Geoff Rickly, a few hours before the band’s performance at Millennium Music Hall in Cardiff. Just over a week prior to this latest string of UK dates, the New Jersey post-hardcore sextet unleashed their sixth album No Devolucion on the world. As fans and critics have since discovered, the band’s newest effort represents somewhat of a diversion from their previous work. However, as Geoff goes on to explain, this new direction has proved to be a pleasantly surprising release. “We’ve never had such positive reviews. It’s really nice that people seem to get the record right away.”
Coincidentally, ‘No Devolucion’ has emerged exactly ten years after the release of ‘Full Collapse’, Thursday’s defining second album. That record was the one that originally made them the internationally-renowned hardcore act that they have since become. April’s trio of UK dates, which saw the band perform in London and Manchester before Cardiff, were an opportunity for the band to introduce the new album to their British fans and to celebrate the 10th anniversary of ‘Full Collapse’. “It’s been pretty fantastic,” says Geoff. “So far London and Manchester have been packed and energetic shows, so it was good.”
After Thursday’s sets at the Reading and Leeds festivals in 2009, this short tour represents a welcome return to the UK for the six-piece band. “This is a lot more intimate playing these small shows, where we get to play a full set instead of a festival show. We’re playing half the new record and ‘Full Collapse’ front to back for the ten-year anniversary, but nothing in between.” Although the newer songs have not been given much of a chance to become familiar among the fans, Geoff confirms that they have turned out to be a highlight of the tour. “We’ve been opening with the new tracks. People have been saying ‘this is the best part of the whole set’. Now I wish we had learned more of the new songs to bring with us.”
Unlike ‘Full Collapse’ and its successors, which have helped to give Thursday the proudly ferocious hardcore image that they have today, ‘No Devolucion’ has taken the band in a seemingly darker and more atmospheric direction. Could this be a taste of things to come? “None of us have really discussed the future of Thursday,” explains Geoff. “‘Full Collapse’ is the record that we’ve been known for, but whatever the future of Thursday is, we want it to start with this record.”
In addition to being a new side to Thursday for their hoards of fans, ‘No Devolucion’ also represents a completely new experience for the band themselves. Geoff goes on to describe how they decided to approach things a bit differently for their sixth album. “It happened pretty naturally. We weren’t trying to change direction, it just kind of happened. There wasn’t a lot of discussion. I think that’s how we tend to get bogged down - we try to talk about what we want it to be and then we try to fix it and make it more like what we discussed. This time, we didn’t talk about what we wanted, we just did it.”
One of the most surprising things about the writing and recording for ‘No Devolucion’, as Geoff confirms, was how the band managed to turn it into a much quicker process, completing the album in a total of six weeks. “I stepped back a bit and let the band write all the music and then I just wrote all the lyrics. They wrote all the music in seven days. A lot of the time, I’d wake up never having heard the song before. The band would finish it, I’d write the lyrics and sing it by the end of the day. It was very different for us.” For him personally, this also proved to be a much more rapid course of action. “In the past, I would work on them, revise them, re-write them and then, when I finally felt comfortable, I would go into the control room and I’d usually work on about a song a day. This time, I recorded the vocals for each song in about two to three hours. It was a lot more spontaneous.”
When it came to the music itself, it seems that some of the band members’ more recent tastes may have had a big impact on Thursday’s new direction. Geoff credits a number of influential English artists with providing inspiration. “Our band was listening to a lot of artists like PJ Harvey and Kate Bush. A lot of soundscape stuff. Everybody in the band, except for me, has been working on scoring films and things like that, so were more interested in soundtrack-type feelings. I think they loved the way the first Portishead record was supposed to be a soundtrack to a fictional movie. They liked that idea that we could write a soundtrack to something that doesn’t even exist.”
He also describes how these newer influences differ greatly from their earlier musical tastes. “In the beginning, we were into a lot of DC-inspired indie rock. Stuff like Lungfish, Circus Lupus, Rites of Spring and Embrace [the US hardcore band from the ‘80s, not the recently-reformed Britpop group].” However, it wasn’t a change in interests that led to the band’s new sound, but a change in attitude. “I don’t think it’s so much that our tastes have changed. It’s just that we’ve become more comfortable letting them affect the music. We always loved The Smiths and The Cure, but a lot of those influences we would just push aside and make a more jagged, frenetic, hardcore-based New Wave thing. Any of the influences that started to seep in but didn’t seem right, we cut out. This time, we let them come through.”
When it came to finding inspiration for the lyrics, Geoff turned to subjects that were close to his heart. “It was mostly just the subject of devotion, which I kept coming back to in the lyrics. At the beginning of the record, I was coming out of a relationship of eight years and I’d been in a relationship with the rest of my band for thirteen years.” He confirms how it isn’t just the music that has developed with the band. “Maybe now that I’m getting older, it appeals to me to talk about long-term devotion. When you’re younger, you think about first love and heartbreak and fast-acting emotion. So few bands actually make it long enough to think about these kinds of older subjects. I thought it would be a lot more interesting to explore these subjects that don’t get a lot of attention.”
He explains how another advantage of getting older relates to their ability as performers. “It’s a lot easier to get up in front of a crowd when you know that you have a really powerful band behind you. I know that my band is one of the best bands I’ve seen. If I just watch them playing instrumentally, I know how great they are and I can see the chemistry and dynamics that they have.” As a vocalist, Geoff confirms how he too has improved over the years. “I’ve learned how to sing in that time, which is nice for me. It used to be a bit of a challenge to get onstage and not know what I was doing. It took a lot of work, but that’s fun [Laughs].”
Anyone who missed the opportunity to catch Thursday on their latest outing need not be concerned as Geoff confirms that they will be back in the UK in the very near future. “Usually, we tour between one and two years, but this time we wanted to make sure that we did the full two years because we really love this record. We’re planning on trying to tour over here as much as possible. Especially with the amazing reaction that the press have given this record in the UK. We knew that we wanted to debut these songs here. We also knew that we wanted to come back to play the festivals and then come back to do another club tour. We want to make this record kind of attached to England because it feels more like an English record than anything we’ve done before.”
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After Thursday’s sets at the Reading and Leeds festivals in 2009, this short tour represents a welcome return to the UK for the six-piece band. “This is a lot more intimate playing these small shows, where we get to play a full set instead of a festival show. We’re playing half the new record and ‘Full Collapse’ front to back for the ten-year anniversary, but nothing in between.” Although the newer songs have not been given much of a chance to become familiar among the fans, Geoff confirms that they have turned out to be a highlight of the tour. “We’ve been opening with the new tracks. People have been saying ‘this is the best part of the whole set’. Now I wish we had learned more of the new songs to bring with us.”
