Thursday: Scream-Rock's Chameleons

08/30/06 11:00am

by Shehzaad Jiwani (CHARTattack)

The phrase "often imitated, never duplicated" seems applicable to New Jersey's post-hardcore heroes Thursday. For better or worse, the band helped bring melodic hardcore to the mainstream, but instead of resting on their laurels, they've proven time and again that they transcend the genre they popularized.

ChartAttack recently spoke to band keyboardist Andrew Everding about how things have changed while they've been gone.

ChartAttack: Where is the band's headspace versus when you released War All The Time in 2003?
Andrew Everding: Three years ago, that was our first record on a major, it was right after Full Collapse, so there was a lot of external pressure around that record. We'd just come off the tour for Full Collapse, like we had three days off after that tour before we started recording. We had to basically write the record in two months, so we wrote War All The Time in two months' time, and it took us six months to record it. This time, we took like four months off after we got back from that tour, then we started writing A City By The Light Divided, and that just totally healed everything.

Why did you cancel the last few stops on the Taste Of Chaos tour?
Geoff's [Rickly, vocals] health took a bit of a tumble towards the end of that. That was basically the first tour we did since touring War All The Time. His throat was in really rough shape and he was really pushing himself too hard as far as singing. His doctor and his vocal coach recommended that if he went any further and strained his voice, he might do some permanent damage, so... he was put on vocal rest and couldn't talk for a couple weeks. He's all better now, but it just sucks that we had to cancel those shows. We have issues that we have to cancel shows in Canada but it's totally beyond our control. We get yelled at a lot by kids who really want to see us and we apologize, but it's one of those situations, you know. I understand when you want to see a band that you really love and they don't show up it's infuriating, but it's not like, "Oh, we don't feel like playing Canada."

The cancellations flared up old rumours of turmoil within the band...
That rumour seems to float around a lot, but I don't think that's the case at all. We were really having a hard time on that War All The Time tour. We were in Australia and we had a difficult time. When we did the Warped Tour we were a little weak in terms of internal band structure, so we just decided that we needed to take a breather. Things weren't crazy. Everybody thinks it's completely dire, like, "Oh my God, it's not gonna go on very long." But the band's been together for eight years. Life spans of bands are like four or five years nowadays. If anything, kids should look back and be like, "Oh my God, they've been a band for over five years." They might not think it lasted as long as it did.

Thursday and Thrice opened for the Deftones in 2003 and got bottles thrown at the stage. When you all headlined Taste Of Chaos this year, you both had bigger draws than the Deftones.
It was just crazy because we had basically been off tour for over a year-and-a-half, then we came back and things had completely changed as far as what people were accepting. Just the fact that Thrice was doing a little better than the Deftones on some of those Taste Of Chaos dates was pretty crazy. Seeing Atreyu and Silverstein and Thrice be huge, the environment we were in last time was completely different and it's like, "What's really going on?"

How do you feel that the genre you helped pioneer has exploded in the last few years?
We've never really sat down and talked about our responsibility for what we did. The whole scene was sort of a do-it-yourself subculture thing, and now it's mainstream. I think there are a lot of bands that are responsible for it.

Do you consciously try to separate yourselves from it?
It's funny because we were on The Cure tour, then we were on Warped Tour, then we do these headlining tours and right now we're out with Minus The Bear, who are like an indie band. We're kind of chameleons in a sense that we can slide around a lot, but I don't think we ever want to separate ourselves from where we came from. I think that one of our goals is to have as many people hear us as possible. That's why on this record, not that we're forcing it on people, but we really want to show everybody what we can do.