Thou is like a salve, a razor, a cut, a healed wound. They are the heartbreak you feel deep inside, the anger at the world, the fury of fate, the distraught and downtrodden given voice. They are the sound of the gutter as it rages against the rain. To give one band the moniker of “voice of a generation” is unfair because so many of us have such different paths and tastes in music. But for me, Thou is maybe that voice, the one that I turn to when I most need someone to tell me the simple phrase, “it’ll fucking be alright.”
To see Thou live is to see a performance of pain and pleasure operated onstage like an open heart surgery. Two guitars, one bass, one drum kit, one larynx-shredding voice. That’s all it took when I saw them most recently in San Antonio to change what has honestly been an utterly shit year around. I saw the rage that I felt at the world and at my life played out by strangers onstage, bathed in mostly red light. I saw the fireworks of music go off, pinging and zinging through a small DIY space as the pit opened and surged and every head banged forwards and backwards, a ballet of the spine.
Before the show, my girlfriend and I met up with Thou. We enjoyed a meal of homemade vegan tacos and eventually I went to their tour van for an interview. Bryan Funck, the previously mentioned larynx-shredding vocalist, is intense – when he looks at you, you know he’s seeing you inside and out, assessing you. It’s an especially intense experience as an interviewer. He makes you feel like you are the subject and he is the examiner. That’s not to say that Bryan isn’t a nice guy – he’s just fucking honest and I respect the shit out of him for that. Mitch Wells, the other subject of the interview, is their highly amiable bassist. Someone once told me that he didn’t fit in visually (he was wearing a Gorillaz shirt when I met him) with the band’s brutal sound, but I think that’s a gross misunderstanding, as Mitch is in many ways the bedrock of the sound and the one who I initially spoke to in order to get the interview.
In the below interview, conducted on a muggy night in west San Antonio, you see a little bit of these gents talking on a variety of subjects, from their game-changing new album Umbilical to the changing reactions of fans and even a reflection on what album they wish they could hear again for the first time. As an interviewer, this was one of my favorite achievements. Thou is a band that deserves to be listened to – don’t just listen to their albums. Listen to what they have to say.