As Thornhill’s Ethan McCann hops on our name, there’s an air of victory in his tone. Regardless of it being late in Australia, he’s cruising in on a excessive, having overwhelmed his frontman to the publish.
“Is Jacob not right here but?” the guitarist smirks, elevating a glass of crimson wine to his lips. “So uncommon of him to be fucking late.”
It’s a playful dig that displays the band’s dynamic – Thornhill is the product of a rock-solid friendship. “It’s a brotherly relationship,” Ethan explains, getting a little bit sentimental. “Jacob’s my oldest buddy, and he’s turn into household. He can’t eliminate me now.”
When Jacob Charlton makes it onto the decision, the floodgates burst open. The pair bounce off each other, balancing brotherly bickering with sarcasm. It’s an vitality they admit can generally give off the fallacious impression.
“Internationally, Australian humour can get misplaced in translation,” Jacob admits. “Typically different bands don’t catch the joke and suppose we’re boastful.”
He highlights one case in 2023, when the band have been supporting Holding Absence on a tour across the UK and Europe. “Holding Absence all assumed we have been gonna be like highschool bullies earlier than they met us, due to how dry we have been onstage,” Jacob recollects. “But when Lucas [Woodland, singer] tried to struggle me, I reckon he would win. I’m certain he can swing – and he can kick these legs excessive, bro. I don’t have the athletic functionality to compete with that. I’ll have to coach… I’ll add it to the listing.”
Ethan rapidly cuts in with a wry smile: “Proper subsequent to turning into a superb singer, proper?”
Behind the shimmering soundscapes and ethereal brooding, the group have been self-confessed dorks again in highschool in Vermont, suburban Melbourne. Even now, the pair indulge within the nerdier facet of issues. Ethan’s forearm is branded with Neversoft’s skewered eyeball emblem in honour of the Tony Hawk’s Professional Skater videogame collection, whereas Jacob is continually upstaged on the decision by his one-eyed cat, Zuko, named after the character from animated TV collection Avatar: The Final Airbender.
“We have been the little nerds within the music room,” Jacob laughs.
The pair fashioned the band in 2015, with drummer Ben Maida and ex-guitarist Sam Anderson, in hopes of seizing the coveted crown at Vermont Secondary Faculty’s Battle Of The Bands.
“Our first title was Configuration,” Ethan says. “Earlier than, we have been in very completely different bands. Jacob was principally in a Metallica cowl band, and I had extra of another rock upbringing. My mother and father used to play Pink Scorching Chili Peppers, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins. We type of discovered the candy spot in the course of our Venn diagram of music style.”
The cherry on prime was the band’s music trainer. “She began exhibiting us emo music,” Ethan smiles. “She was like our musical godmother. She pointed us in the fitting course.”
Jacob even introduced some choral data to the desk, because the frontman was a part of the Australian Boys Choir for six years. “I didn’t adore it,” he admits. “However I suppose it made me extra conscious of harmonies. However then your voice adjustments as you develop up, and you need to learn to use it yet again… So I principally needed to begin from scratch once more anyway.”
Thornhill have a penchant for ranging from scratch, continuously rebuilding their sound from the bottom up. Whereas 2019’s The Darkish Pool set the band up as metalcore’s subsequent large factor, providing a masterclass in technical prog and djent riffage, 2022’s Heroine was a tonal shift, bringing in soporific shoegaze and darkish glamour.
Self-indulgently wealthy and drowning in reverb, Heroine was a love letter to 90s alt metallic. Tracks comparable to Valentine and The Hellfire Membership oozed a melt-in-your-mouth liminality, whereas the album’s movies have been hypnotic. Arkangel’s wet, grainy photographs, harking back to The Crow, amplified grittier guitar tones, whereas Casanova’s Nineteen Sixties James Bond discoball aesthetic added to the monitor’s woozier qualities.
“I used to be impressed by the overdramatic realm of cinema, significantly Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet,” Jacob explains. “That report was an entire package deal. The movies have been equally as essential because the music.”
Nonetheless, the report was written over lockdown, and the band rapidly realised it didn’t translate effectively stay. “It’s onerous for a crowd to take pleasure in a bunch of dudes enjoying shoegaze,” Jacob laughs. “We lacked a little bit of motion on the final report, we shifted focus away from heavy music. Once we went again out on the street, we remembered how enjoyable heavier tracks are to play. On Our bodies, we’re chasing the dopamine.”
New album Our bodies is the right assembly level of The Darkish Pool and Heroine, the place shoegaze merges with uncooked, metallic distortion. Single Nerv encapsulates the band’s newest period, its weightless choruses offsetting the scratchy ferocity of every verse.
“I believe Nerv is the very best music we’ve ever made,” Jacob says. “It was the primary monitor we wrote after correctly moving into the stride of the report’s sound. We despatched it backwards and forwards a number of instances, then we have been each similar to, ‘This music fucking slaps.’”
“I believe we forgot the best way to collaborate throughout lockdown, which is after we wrote Heroine,” Ethan chimes in. “Collaboration is how we work finest. We used to report in our bassist Nick Sjogren’s mother and father’ home, all our minds in a single room, all collectively. It took till midway via Our bodies to get again into our collaborative stride – Nerv was the ‘eureka’ second. Then we went again and rewrote every thing.”
Whereas Our bodies packs extra chew than Heroine, the essence of nostalgia stays. Glimmers of latest sounds are additionally thrown into the wonderful combine, as Crush pulses with sultry, muted R&B affect. It’s Thornhill’s personal manner of dragging the 90s into the current.
“I undoubtedly suppose the 90s is an enormous factor for us,” Ethan provides. “We’re simply 27, so perhaps we’ve type of romanticised it in our heads, nevertheless it felt like the last word period of expression and insurrection. Objectively, I’d additionally say it’s when heavy music was at its peak coolness. There was an vitality about it.”
The mantra for Our bodies was virtually, ‘What would a 90s band do?’. “If I’d launched my debut in 1995, what would I comply with it up with in, say, ’99?” Ethan says. “We undoubtedly need to attempt to seize the identical vitality as these data, that sense you’re listening to one thing new and definitive of the last decade. We’re working in the direction of that.”
“Our motto has at all times been that it is best to write the music that you simply personally need to hear,” Jacob explains. “If you happen to’re not content material with the present sound inside a style, you attempt to discover what the scene is missing.”
Thornhill have already earned approval from a few of metalcore’s greatest names, supporting the likes of Architects and Bury Tomorrow, and have even ticked off their first UK headline exhibits. Right this moment, Jacob reveals they’re going all-in to make the band a hit.
“You possibly can both be broke and do music full time, otherwise you could be barely much less broke and have an informal job on the facet – and I’m selecting to remain broke proper now,” Jacob grins. “That’s simply the sacrifice you make.”
Our bodies is out now by way of UFND. Thornhill play Louder Than Life on September 19 and Aftershock on October 3.
