We Disappear: Love, Death And Technology With The Thermals

Photos: Jason Quigley

We can’t rely on many things. We’re all going to die, so that’s one. The Thermals will keep writing songs about dying, or at least the lingering prospect of it, so we can call that two. Then there’s love. You’ll get good odds on falling in, or in and out, of it at some stage. Let’s ink that in as number three.

The latter is a prickly subject when you’re talking Thermals records. ‘Personal Life’, their one previous release that could be said to explicitly deal with it, is acidic enough to suck your face inside out in the grand tradition of Homer and the Super Sour Ball. “Your love is so strong, it’s only a fear in your eyes. Your love is so strong, it’s only a series of lies,” Hutch Harris sings at one stage. And that’s just when he feels like being up front about things.

‘We Disappear’, out later this month on Saddle Creek, is different. It’s not star-crossed or particularly soft-centred, but there’s an optimism at work here. Even its regrets, and it’s got a few, are largely framed fondly. “I’ve been listening to the voice inside my head, wishing I heard you instead,” runs the bridge of Thinking of You, a song described by the band, with Harris lining up alongside long-time musical counterpoint Kathy Foster and drummer Westin Glass, as a “point-blank post-break up song”.

“It was so cynical on ‘Personal Life’,” Harris says. “You know, that is an honest record, but it has this mask of cynicism, like ‘ouch!’. I remember the person I was dating at the time, we were still together when that record came out. She actually liked it. It wasn’t until we were sitting there listening to it together that I was like: ‘Damn. This is fucked up.’

“But I think the tone on the new record is more melancholy and it’s more like me owning up to the mistakes that I’ve made. As opposed to just blaming it on someone else or just having a cynical view of love overall. I don’t think I have a cynical view of love now, but I definitely have in the past.  I feel better about this record now than I did about ‘Personal Life’ at the time. I think it was stuff that I needed to get off my chest but it didn’t feel good. This feels a lot better.”

Harris has rarely been as open in his writing as he is here. The Thermals have always been able to cut you with a withering line or set your blood boiling with a political sketch, but theirs has long been a world of character pieces, narrative devices and grand scope. Their two most widely admired albums, ‘The Body, The Blood, The Machine’ and ‘Now We Can See’ stand with one foot in the concept album camp. ‘We Disappear’, by way of comparison, is a personal work. Its songs accumulated over several years, breaking with the time-sensitive thematic drive of writing sessions for previous records, and reflect the fact. It’s more conversational and the lyric sheet is dotted with wes, mes and yous.

“I was looking over all of our records and part of me was thinking: ‘I’m always honest, I’m always straightforward about what I’m trying to say,’” Harris says. “And when I actually went back and looked at a lot of the lyrics I had written I was like: ‘No, I don’t think I have been like that at all.’ Then I felt that I was hiding behind stories, or lyrics where I wasn’t saying exactly what I meant. I was just doing it for myself. I just wanted to feel that I wasn’t hiding behind anything.”

Another to benefit from the change in approach was producer Chris Walla. The former Death Cab For Cutie guitarist has been working with the Thermals since the beginning, having mixed their debut, ‘More Parts Per Million’, and produced the straight ahead ‘Fuckin A’ and ‘Personal Life’, but this is the first time that his studio techniques have been given real time in the spotlight.

After ‘Desperate Ground’, a condensed, merciless fuzz-bomb of a record, here there are open spaces and, for the first time, drawn-out structures amid the fizzing power-pop hooks. On The Great Dying and Years In A Day, the band stretch their legs like they never have before, coming alive in nods to Fugazi’s looping guitars and, on the latter in particular, the skyscraping atmospherics of mid-’90s emo.

“The two records that Chris has really produced for us, ‘Fuckin A’ and ‘Personal Life’, there’s barely any overdubs, there’s no tricks. There’s no weird studio stuff going on,” Harris says. “We’ve never really used Chris to his full potential at all. Chris is a real studio producer. I was like: ‘Let’s give him a lot of stuff to work with. Do a tonne of overdubs.’ He brought in all these weird synthesizers. There’s all these crazy sounds and feedback stuff that we really hadn’t explored with him. That was one of the coolest things about making this record, just letting Chris do a bunch of weird tricks in the studio."

As much as this record is open to change, though, some things never do. Always around the corner, waiting to hook your feet out from under you with that glimmering scythe, is death. It’s a preoccupation that has served Harris well in the last decade and a bit. Here, he’s interested in what stays behind, viewing the idea of leaving a legacy through the prism of social media and technology.

“Into the code, we stay alive. We will be whole, we will survive,” he sings on the opener. “In the code we will always exist.” Harris uses Twitter as much as the rest of us and believes that pressing your thoughts to wax represents a similar process of self preservation. But he can’t shake that worn-in fatalistic streak.

“It’s what a lot of us are trying to achieve on the internet,” he says. “That’s nothing new for humans, that’s what all art is about. You’re trying to leave something behind that represents who you are and how you felt about living. I feel like it’s all gonna be gone one day so it’s futile to try to do that. But then our lives are so short. We’re trying to make something that will at least last beyond us, but still not for very long in the grand scheme of things.”  

‘We Disappear’ is something of an anomaly in the band’s back catalogue, but it does share sonic similarities with ‘The Body, The Blood, The Machine’, which also stands out from the crowd. Where the new record is the Thermals embracing a different pace and style of work, their 2006 high water mark is more of a time capsule. When it was released, its dystopian reading of a Christian theocracy picked up the baton from ‘Fuckin A’ highlight God and Country and ran until its lungs gave out.

The fervour behind Harris’s words made it one of the most pointed, vital musical responses to the Bush government. Eventually, though, it too slipped into the code. Almost three years later, while reviewing ‘Now We Can See’, Pitchfork’s Rebecca Raber wrote that the election of Barack Obama meant that the US had “(hopefully) outgrown the need for an album like TBTBTM”.

But, as Harris will tell you, things change. When he picks up the phone on an LA morning, we’re a couple of days on from Donald Trump, ludicrous of hair and policy, romping home in the GOP’s Super Tuesday primaries. The same Trump who, leading up to the vote, had repeatedly failed to censure the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, while continuing to peddle rhetoric informed by a cocktail of xenophobia, entrenched fear and the spittle-flecked passion of his delivery. There are clouds on the horizon. There’s a chance of rain. Maybe we’ll need to dust off ‘The Body, The Blood, The Machine’ after all.

“I was having this conversation last night,” Harris says. “It was kind of funny until three to four weeks ago. Then, all of a sudden, everyone’s like: 'This is fucking terrifying.' He’s bringing out the most repugnant, racist side of America. Beyond all that, he has zero experience. Those people getting behind him, they don’t realise that he has absolutely no experience in politics. At all. Whether people are horrible enough to agree with what he says, he cannot do this fucking job, he can’t do this job.

“He has zero experience. It’s weird, just in the past year,  how far the right has moved to the right and how far the left has moved to the left. I’ll vote for whoever. I’ll vote for Hillary or Bernie, but it is a freak show on both sides, just a total freak show. The movie Idiocracy keeps coming up. It’s a satire of itself. It is like Robocop. It’s like you couldn’t write a satire as crazy as what’s actually happening right now.”  

'We Disappear' is out on March 25 through Saddle Creek.

Related News