It’s a bold move for a band nearly 30 years into their career to write a record about going westward into the horizon. The passage of time is scary for everyone, but it has to be even more interesting for a band that recently celebrated the two-decade anniversary of a fan favorite: 2003’s The Artist in the Ambulance. The fact that Horizons/West, out October 3 via Epitaph Records, feels like it nostalgically recognizes Thrice’s stellar history and back catalogue is an interesting choice. The California group’s first-ever sequel, it’s a release that only happened because of the happy accident of too much great material, and became great due to reconnecting with the past.
Horizons/West finds the band not only firing on all cylinders but reconnecting with the best parts of what made and make Thrice Thrice, for not only fans, but for themselves. It’s naturally a thought-provoking experience, but like the band’s best, it’s emotional and punchy instead of navel gazing. Rather than walking into the sunset with West, it feels and sounds like Thrice are as inspired as ever to push themselves into new horizons.
“Originally, we were not planning on (making West),” vocalist and guitarist Dustin Kensrue admits. “We were just making Horizons. Then we had a bunch of songs, and we became really excited about making two records—companion pieces. We’ll do East and West. When we finished wrapping up East—because that was going to come out first—we realized there’s no gas in the tank right now (for more). We realized we don’t have to do it right now. I know we said we would, but that’s just on us. So, we decided to postpone it. We did the re-record of The Artist in the Ambulance, and we knew we were going to have to tour on that anyway for the 20-year anniversary.
“We let West sit and marinate,” he adds. “The cool thing that happened with it was, when we split it, I had these ideas for kind of theming towards the east and west and really running with it. For East, I don’t feel like the imagery is quite as focused. You see it in different parts of the record, but it’s not woven all the way through the way that West is, having had time to really know that that was what’s coming for a couple of years. That’s just been kind of percolating in the back of my mind as we approached writing for this.
“There were a lot of pieces from before,” he says, “but I think what’s actually interesting—and maybe an interesting concept in the way that the records feel in contrast to each other—is the process for writing the first half was very drawn out. This one, we were gathering ideas. A ton of the work happened every day together for a month straight. There’s something about that process that I think gave this record a different energy. There just wasn’t a lot of second-guessing certain things. I feel like each song had maybe two full days where we were really jamming out in the studio and then pulling pieces from those things together, fine-tuning as we tracked it. There’s just stuff that happens when you’re jamming together and not overthinking it yet. You don’t know what it is yet, so you’re reacting in different ways.
“I’ve listened to them back-to-back a couple of times after we finished this one,” he adds, “And I think that there’s some interesting contrasts. Sometimes we’ve been reactive in the past to something, and we were definitely not trying to react to East in a sense, but trying to stay in the same general headspace. Experiment with making another record that was playing with a lot of the same elements a few years later. West feels more dense in a certain ways, while there’s a lot of space on East. West is packed with more energy. Even the more chill songs, there’s something loaded about them. It’s just spring-wound up in it or something.”
I have a sneaking suspicion that re-recording the record that arguably launched their career may have played into the vocabulary and comfort Thrice felt in writing songs that feel denser, grittier, and more mysterious. Personally, Artist made this here writer not only a life-long fan, but also helped get me out of a certain headspace I needed to begin to leave behind. Music may not change the world, but it can change your world. It’s also an essential companion piece. It sounds and feels like the definitive version of a record that shaped my teenage years. Few re-workings actually work out that way. On how the re-recording of The Artist in the Ambulance helped him appreciate that record more, Kensrue has little doubt it was necessary and fun work.
“I think it’s a combination of us getting more comfortable as players in general, but also just these songs having time and space to find their ideal resting space. It’s almost like you’re shaking something and letting it settle to where it naturally wants to be. I think the fact that you feel that way about it makes me feel like we did the thing we were trying to do, which was to just not try to screw them too much, but let them feel the way they feel to us now when we play them live. And it’s retaining all of those essential things that we put in there at the beginning. When you listen back-to-back now, it’s hard for me to listen to the old one because this is not how these songs feel to us.
“A lot of it was that we used to have a slightly more limited vocabulary musically of what we were doing,” he adds, “and it was like, ‘OK, let’s add a new thing. Let’s add a new thing.’ Then after The Alchemy Index, it was just like, “Ah, OK, (we can do) all the things now.’ Then it becomes just a weird shifting over time of different things starting to resonate for a second with you, and you take all that vocabulary, and you shove it in a certain direction. I think these two Horizon records very much don’t feel like they have any specific direction. They just feel very centered, even though they’re very diverse records.
“If that’s just because we’ve been playing long enough that it’s just settling organically into something,” he says. “I also think, maybe what’s interesting about this record too is after playing Artist and The Illusion of Safety again for their anniversaries, there’s a reacquainting with some of the language of our past that we had set to the side for various reasons, wanting to explore new things, and we don’t want to just keep doing the same thing. Having had that space to re-approach it and be like, ‘Well, that’s fun!’ Now, we’re bringing it back in because it sounds fun to us, not because it’s expected or we don’t know what else to do or whatever. That’s a fun space to really have had the time to circle back to some of those things. I’m excited what that means going forward and picking some of that back up again.”
You heard it here first, folks. Heavy Thrice are back (they never left; you just cling to the idea of things when you were young and formative, and that’s OK). I will quibble with Kensrue a little on not having specific directionality, as both companion records—and certainly Horizons/West—feel like a bridge, an extended hand, a palm, if you will. That bridge is between many different versions of the self and the band. Kensrue’s business jargon of “circling back” is interesting, as this never sounds like a retread but a reminder that the group can do whatever they want, and that maybe still includes things they forgot they wanted. You are today what you were before still, but better. West showcases that in spades. Thematically, how that plays out in various anchor points, where Kensrue aches to hold on while also moving on, revels in the reality of numerous journeys westward.
“It’s very purposeful that ‘The Dark Glow’ is at the center of the record,” Kensrue says, “but on the other side of the disk is ‘Holding On.’ Those two things are getting at what you’re talking about where one is holding on, even when you don’t know how interesting that there’s something past this point you’re at. Then’ The Dark Glow’ is real heavy and then hits that shifting point in the middle and questions if you’re looking at everything completely backwards. What if there’s a totally different way to look at it, and it’s beautiful, and it’s loving? It is a really heavy thematically record in a lot of ways, but I do think there’s a lot of love and hope that is anchoring. It tilts very strongly towards those things, even though there’s a lot of darkness.
“It’s about orienting towards a mystery,” he continues, “realizing that at the very bottom, all of the ways we have for talking about whatever it is, are metaphors and not the thing itself. And so, you can then end up talking about it from a variety of angles, but all of those are very insufficient for what that thing is, and what that thing is can be experienced in some ways. I’ve been doing this for a couple of records, but using the metaphor of darkness at times instead of something bad or scary as something that is mysterious.”
While Horizons/East took influence from Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, the companion also found inspiration from the famous fabulist:
“One of the books I was reading while writing this was Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a weird, super-cool book, it’s an ethnography of future people on post-apocalyptic earth. The people there have an idea of these songs for the dying, and one of the ways they talk about dying is going west to the sunrise, which I really like because in every ending there are new beginnings. That’s very much just the way that the world works. The past couple of years, I’ve just been hitting that point in life, which I think often gets framed as people having a midlife crisis, whatever you want to call that. There’s some interesting names for what is happening in people’s brains as they hit certain points developmentally and much more positive ways that you can think about that time than crisis.
“Essentially, there’s a reckoning that’s happening,” he adds, “as you see yourself poised between all these things that you’ve done, and you’re starting to look towards the end more. So, there’s an evaluation of what was good with all that, what was bad? What am I going to do going forward? It’s a very interesting head space to be in as I thought about beginnings and endings.”
Horizons/West is oAut Friday, and you can preorder it from Epitaph Records. Follow Thrice on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for future updates. Get the issue here.
Cover photo courtesy of Attiba Jefferson
