The Thermals, of Portland, Oregon, have been churning out intelligent and incredibly catchy pop-punk for the past decade. The band, consisting of guitarist/vocalist Hutch Harris, bassist Kathy Foster and drummer Westin Glass, signed to Saddle Creek records earlier this year and released Desperate Ground, their sixth LP, in April. 2013 also sees The Thermals celebrating the 10 year anniversary of their debut, More Parts Per Million.
The band is embarking on a sizeable U.S. tour over the next month, and I sent a few questions their way as it got started. The Thermals play The Sinclair on May 23rd with Earthquake Party! and Pretty & Nice, which you obviously should not miss. Read up on what Kathy had to say about setlists, the band’s new record, big-name producers and the concept-album-concept below.
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Ben Stas: Desperate Ground strikes me as a more raw and urgent album than your previous two. Would you agree? Was that the intention?
Yes, we wanted to return to writing songs closer to our original style – fast, loud, catchy and energetic – with ever-progressing lyrics. Raw and urgent songs are just too fun to play!
How did your signing with Saddle Creek for the new record come about?
We recorded Desperate Ground without a label and without any label in mind. Once it was done, we shopped it around and Saddle Creek was one of the labels who got in touch. We’ve been friends with them and a lot of the SC bands for years, they offered us the best deal, and agreed to our terms, so it was pretty much a no-brainer. It’s been awesome so far! They are really great to work with and it feels really comfortable.
More Parts Per Million is celebrating a 10th anniversary this year. Are you revisiting a lot of those songs for this tour? Do you tend to keep a lot of older songs in the setlists, or focus mostly on what’s current?
Yes, it was officially ten years in March! So we were celebrating that for sure when we played shows in New York, New Jersey, Austin (SXSW) and LA in March. We pretty much only played songs from Desperate Ground and More Parts Per Million. On our upcoming US tour, we’re balancing out our set with songs from other albums too. Yeah, we play a bunch of older songs as well as lots of Desperate Ground songs.
You’ve worked with some pretty big names in the mixing/producing of Thermals records (Fugazi’s Brendan Canty, Death Cab For Cutie’s Chris Walla). How did those partnerships come about? How do you go about selecting who produces each record?
A lot of our decisions have come about pretty naturally and easily. Chris Walla kind of set the foundation for what kind of people we work with, and how we work in the studio. (Death Cab For Cutie helped us out a lot in the beginning. Ben Gibbard gave our demos to Sub Pop in the first place, and then one of our first tours was with Death Cab, and that’s how we met Chris.) Chris mixed the first record, and then insisted on recording our second record, Fuckin A. He basically told us he was doing it. He was so fucking excited! It was awesome to work with that kind of energy. Going forward from there, we just wanted to keep working with people who were excited to work with us. and we liked that he was also a musician. It made it easier to relate to each other.
We met Brendan Canty when we worked with him on the Portland edition of the Burn to Shine series he was doing, where he’d have a bunch of bands play in a house slated to be burned down by the fire department for training purposes. He was great to work with, and later Sub Pop suggested we record our next album with him. He was super stoked and came out to Portland to record The Body the Blood the Machine. He was so fun to work with! Such positive energy. Such a funny, fun, excited, jolly man. We had the best time.
Pretty much the same story with John Congleton and John Agnello. Both of those guys wanted to work with us and were excited about it. Both are super fun and funny too. Everyone we’ve recorded with understands what we’re about and what we want to achieve in the studio, and they’ve all brought the right energy. And everyone has been really easy and fun to work with. We laugh a lot in the studio. We could never work with anyone who takes themselves too seriously.
Does that tie in with trying to create a certain atmosphere for each one?
Yeah, definitely: an atmosphere that is fun and comfortable to work in. We go into the studio with complete song ideas pretty much. There have been songs we’ve written or completed in the studio, but they’ve come together pretty quick. So, we’re pretty focused and know what we want. Everyone we’ve worked with understands that about us.
How do you feel about the idea of a concept album in the context of the type of music you make? The Body, The Blood, The Machine has often been described as such, but I’ve read that you disagree with that classification.
We feel like the better term is “theme.” Most of our albums have themes. We don’t think of them as concept albums, because we don’t start off with a plan or story of what the album is going to be about. It’s become this natural way of putting an album together for us. We start off with the music, coming up with riffs and song ideas. We jam a lot of ideas, and play songs in all sorts of different ways to figure out what we like best. Then, Hutch starts to come up with ideas for lyrics, and a theme starts to shape from there.
The lyrics for that album felt like a very direct reaction to the American political climate at the time. Has your lyrical inspiration come from elsewhere on the last few records?
Yeah for sure. Now We Can See is about death and life after death. It kind of picks up from where The Body the Blood the Machine left off. The end of TBTBTM is apocalyptic. On Now We Can See, the protagonist is reflecting on life on Earth, his own death, and what humans did to each other and their planet. On Personal Life, the protagonist is dealing with something even more terrifying: monogamy! It’s about love and its complications. Desperate Ground is about human obsession with war and violence but from an entertaining point of view. It’s not pro or anti anything. It’s like watching a movie. We started to think of it as a war movie or an action movie in album form. It’s not a political or religious album at all. Saying it’s about war maybe sounds political, but it’s not taking a stand one way or the other.
In a general sense, what is your songwriting process like? Has it changed much since the More Parts days?
It’s changed a lot since More Parts Per Million, since Hutch wrote, played and recorded everything on that album! We’ve grown into a good way of writing. We’ve always jammed ideas and started with the music first, then lyrics. Some songs come together quickly, others take a lot of work. We definitely keep fine tuning the process and learning and growing. Mainly, we just keep working on something until we love it. And we’re not afraid to throw away songs or ideas no matter how long we’ve worked on them.
What have you been listening to lately? Any early favorite records from 2013?
Most recently, I’ve been listening to Colleen Green’s Sock it to Me a lot. It’s so good! Bleached is awesome too. And I’m still listening to everything by OFF!. I love that shit!
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