“It should be noted that when we were younger, I was an extreme hater.”
Photo: Daniel DeSlover/Sipa USA/Alamy
Thursday broke up more than a decade ago after helping define 2000s post-hardcore. Then they reunited. Then they broke up again. And finally, in 2016, they reunited and stayed reunited as lead singer Geoff Rickly got sober and toured for the 20th anniversaries of their beloved screamo classics Full Collapse and War All the Time. The band’s friends in My Chemical Romance — Rickly produced their first album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, and they asked Thursday to play with them at MCR’s first reunion tour date in 2019 — had something to do with Thursday finally sticking around for good.
“When we were at the show, they were kind of like, ‘Why would you preemptively break it off again? Just keep doing it,’” Rickly recalls. “‘This is all bonus time. The band already died its death. Enjoy it.’”
Now, Thursday is using that “bonus time” to do something they haven’t done in 13 years: drop a new single. “Application for Release From the Dream,” out April 12, is a near-five-minute mélange of Thursday’s aural specialties, all echoing reverb, Rickly’s plaintive yet hopeful affect, and a call-and-response section that feels like getting splattered with mosh-pit sweat. After wrapping a tour honoring War All the Time and amid recording an audiobook version of his vivid and poetic 2023 debut novel, Someone Who Isn’t Me, which a few directors have expressed interest in adapting, Rickly spoke about Thursday’s future plans. “It took us a long time to get here, and I don’t know what will come next,” he says. “But it does feel freeing to not be on a label and to just be doing it.”
Last year, when talking about new music from Thursday, you said, “So far we haven’t written anything worth putting out.” What changed with “Application for Release From the Dream”?
In 2019, we started writing and it was really contentious. We were tossing demos back and forth, and nothing was happening. We let them sit for a while. With the last one, everyone was like, “This one has an amazing chorus. How can you not like that?” And I was like, “I just feel like it’s too much the same thing over and over again.” Stu Richardson, who plays bass for us on tour and is an amazing producer, was like, “That’s an easy fix.” Stu slowed down the beginning, took out the drums, and added some keyboards and then I sang a totally different thing over it, and it was like, “Oh! Suddenly I love this song!”
The funny thing is, I don’t know what will come next from us, but now that the Band-Aid is off, it feels a lot easier to write together. Since we got back together eight years ago, this is the biggest the band’s been. Every night we’re going out and the audience makeup is tilting toward younger fans instead of people that have been with us the whole time.
That was the question that I had to ask: Is an album in the works? Is it a hard “no” with the possibility of a “yes”?
When it comes to this band — and probably when it comes to me, if I’m being honest — a hard “no” is always a possible “yes.” [Laughs.] That’s just the kind of person that I am. I feel very strongly about things until something changes my mind. Right now the idea is “We did a split, maybe we’ll do a song for a compilation. Maybe we’ll do a cover. Maybe we’ll do a split seven-inch with a young band that we love.” That reminds me of how we started the band: We were playing basement shows, we didn’t want to ever do a record. Then for years we battled to get in and out of contracts with different labels, and I love not having that right now. It’s beautiful.
I read an interview from years ago where you talked about meeting with Rick Rubin and telling him that you wanted Thursday’s music at that point to “be less real and more true.” Where does “Application for Release From the Dream” fall on that continuum?
Somebody that I played it for that I respect a lot said, “I love how straightforward it is. You just decided to write a song and you got right to the point.” That’s the way it really feels to me.
Before we wrote War All the Time, I wrote “War all the time” on a big banner and put it in the studio, and I started putting these little paranoid, postmodern phrases on it that I wanted to put in the record. I thought the record should be claustrophobic. I wanted people to feel the way that I was feeling, which was I know we’re about to go to war with the wrong country, and in my personal life, I feel at war with myself. All these things I was starting to think about — the idea that every society is atomized, and that every part of the society’s ills are present in every person and every action that a society takes. I wanted the band to write a record that captured that feeling. I was always overly deterministic about what I thought the record should be, and this time — because I was the one resisting it — I never got there. It’s got the least amount of philosophizing about it. In some ways, it’s what I would want if I was a fan. You’re 13 years older than the last time you did it. Who are you now?
I remember listening to War All the Time and feeling a little less alone because of its political perspective, because of its anxiety and discomfort with post-9/11 America heading into war. Were you primarily in that headspace while writing it?
That was part of it. Trigger warning or whatever, but I was fairly suicidal at the time, too, and I was seeing some false equivalencies in the world around me. Like, This is the reason why: It’s because I grew up in this place that is so poisoned. And maybe there is some truth to that, but I was certainly not seeing my personal part in my own unhappiness at all. But it’s a strange thing to be at a 20-year remove and feel like, if anything, things might be worse. I think all the time about that song “This Song Brought to You by a Falling Bomb.”
My favorite song on the record.
Thank you. I was playing that last night in Brazil and thinking that basically, every part of American society does end up being complicit with the violence that the state sponsors, and that even protest music, if you’re paying your taxes, is also funding it. I had this feeling of being so trapped. That isn’t even a productive feeling, you know what I mean? Because it’s like, if you’re going to be active, don’t get doom-pilled. There’s no time for nihilism. But I’ve thought about, What does it mean to be the conscience of the country, the part that says, “We’re not so bad; we have a left party”? And then you see the left party do just as many of the bad things, but with the caveat of, like, “But we’re the good guys.” Sorry to get so political.
No, that’s fine. What I’ll say is I think a lot about a quote from the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, which is “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” To me, War All the Time captures that idea.
I’ve never heard that and I love that. That is absolutely how it has to be. The six years that I’ve been sober, I try to remember that the serenity prayer is so simple and it doesn’t even feel like it’s tied to any kind of a specific religion, which helps. “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” And my sponsor always says, “The wisdom’s the hard part.” Understanding what things you can control is really the hard part. Because yeah, I do have the will to change what I can, and I want to. I have friends in the program, and some of them will say, “I hate when the program tells you to worry about cleaning your side of the street, and that’s all it is.” Like, no — we still have to fight, you know what I mean? It doesn’t mean, like, “Well, I’m just an addict. I can’t do anything.”
You did the Emo’s Not Dead cruise and you’re doing the When We Were Young Festival again this year. Are there any bands from those aughts days with whom you lost touch that you’re now reconnected with?
Absolutely. It should be noted that when we were younger, I was such an extreme hater. I’d just be like, “That band sucks. That band sucks.” And now, they’re all adults and I know them as just my peers, and I’m like, Oh, why was I ever such a jerk to these guys?
Dashboard Confessional is somebody that I completely lost touch with for a really long time, and we reconnected and he’s just the best. I’m so glad that I get to be friends with him again. He’s been through so much, too, that it really feels like we came out on the other side of something. And then bands like Silverstein. Victory Records at the time pitted us against each other in this weird way. When I talked to Silverstein finally, they were like, “We had no idea they were doing that. We should have been friends.”
Is there a War All the Time song that’s a favorite to play now versus when the album first came out?
We wrote that record after two years of absolutely relentless touring. Our chemistry was insane. But in the recording studio, a thing that you could pull off once didn’t mean it was a thing that you could consistently do. I sang really at the edge of my range, and the band was right at the edge of what they could do. There were three or four songs on the record that we almost never played because we couldn’t play them; they were just too hard. Two songs in particular were murder on my voice, and the biggest one is “Tomorrow I’ll Be You.” I just couldn’t sing that live. Now when we play it, I feel totally confident. I don’t know why I sing so much better in my 40s than I did in my 20s, but I can hit all those notes and I feel great about it.
I read an interview you did with Trent Reznor in 2004. You asked him about The Downward Spiral: “Did you ever have the feeling that it was your masterpiece?” Did you ever feel that when you were working on Full Collapse or War All the Time?
Full Collapse, there was a moment. “How Long Is the Night?” was the last song we mixed. We had been up all night. It was 10:30 a.m. and we had not stopped, and finally we were getting it into the range where it was like, This is just about done. This is as done as it’s ever going to be. Tim Gilles, the mix engineer who I’ve known since I was, like, 16, turned to me, and he was laughing. He was like, “No matter what you do in the future, no matter how high your band gets, there will be people who will argue that you never got better than this. And I’m just telling you because it is a strange little masterpiece.”
That’s the closest I’ve ever felt to Maybe it is a little masterpiece. When War All the Time was being made, I was not in a good place. I remember thinking, If I die, then maybe people will love these records, and it seems like a fair trade-off. I just didn’t really see anything good happening in life. I’m glad that I’ve made it past that era. And I’m not one of those people that thinks, All that matters is that you listen to music from now; I don’t want to repeat the past. I just don’t have that relationship with music. I think any time you make something that’s worth playing again, play it again and then play the new one. It’s not either/or. It’s like, How lucky am I that I get to celebrate something that people still care about?
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
