Thursday Biography

Thursday have always been difficult to categorize. Although they famously rose out of New Brunswick, New Jersey’s basement culture they’ve always been far too cerebral to be considered a traditional hardcore band. Over their eleven-year career they’ve toured with everyone from the Cure to Cursive, but have retained an inherent aggressiveness that can only come from being weaned on similarly independent nineties acts like Ink And Dagger and Lifetime. All of these references to other bands only serve as guidelines - and with COMMON EXISTENCE Thursday have finally reconciled all of their seemingly disparate literary and musical influences into a collection of songs that span the spectrum of human emotions from frustration to hope and, above all, love.

When Thursday singer Geoff Rickly, guitarists Tom Keeley and Steve Pedulla, bassist Tim Payne, drummer Tucker Rule and keyboardist Andrew Everding - delivered the genre-defining FULL COLLAPSE, Alternative Press called 2001 “The Year Punk Broke Again.” SPIN christened the band the “The Next Big Thing” featuring Rickly on its cover in 2004. Thursday’s major-label debut, WAR ALL THE TIME, was a commercial success - but, ultimately, Thursday abandoned that route. Instead, they became something far more impressive in today’s musical climate: A band that eschewed gimmicks, instead forging a unique, organic and evolving sound more lasting than trend. The New York Times concluded, “They may not be rock stars, but by a kind of critical consensus they have emerged as the standard-bearers for their sound, the band considered most likely to survive the vagaries of rock trend-hopping.”

It worked and fans embraced the band’s subsequent releases such as their Dave Fridmann-produced 2006 opus A CITY BY THE LIGHT DIVIDED, 2007’s CD/DVD package KILL THE HOUSE LIGHTS and this year’s extremely well-received split-EP with the legendary Japanese screamo band Envy. Though the band have taken some time off to work on other projects-including Rickly’s visceral outfit United Nations, Keeley’s Black Jets project and Rule’s jaunt overseas to fill-in with My Chemical Romance - they have spent the better part of the past twelve months in a damp warehouse in New Jersey writing the songs that comprise COMMON EXISTENCE. “We worked on this record every day for almost a year,” explains Rickly, adding that the band spent six hours a day poring over the instrumentation and arrangements of these songs until they came up with something they were all ecstatic about.

“Writing this album was an enormous amount of work because we wanted to do something that was a progression and was also closer to the heart of what Thursday’s sound is about,” Rickly explains. “I think the rest of my band has really amazing chemistry and I really wanted to push them to find even deeper strengths than they had before,” he continues, “despite all the hard work, it’s the most fun I’ve had making a record.” And it shines through while listening to the disc in lieu of the sometimes heady subject matter.