Photo by Bill Shouldis

Our writer Leah interviewed Thursday lead singer Geoff Rickly last year before the band’s show at the TLA in Philadelphia. Since that interview, there has been plenty of activity in the band’s camp. They announced a split EP with Japanese hardcore heroes Envy, due out this fall on Temporary Residence. The band played a triumphant show with Hot Water Music and Paint It Black at NYC’s Terminal 5 in July. Now, plans for a new full-length have taken form, with a tentative release date set for early 2009. I caught up with Geoff on the phone a few weeks ago to talk about all the band’s upcoming plans for the next few months.

One of my favorite moments involving Thursday was when you guys played Long Island during Warped Tour 2006. The infamous scene where you broke your nose after you swung the mic and hit yourself in the face. It was one of the most incredible performances I’d ever seen, especially at Warped Tour, because everything is so sterile and tame there and here you were gushing blood on everybody.

Geoff: It was a telling thing for me. Through the pain [and] the questions that went through my head, all these little things happened that day that made me wonder about how our little world works. One of them was half way through the next song. The security guards came to our tour manager and said, ‘you tell him not to jump down into the crowd because we don’t want any faggot blood on us. We don’t need to get AIDS working on this job.’ Which I thought was such an insane thing to say. The other was, we sold more than twice the amount of merch that day then we had the rest of the tour. We sold almost $20,000 in merch that day. Kids are drawn to that thing I guess. It was like, ‘blood will make kids buy t-shirts. No wonder goth bands do so well.’ You play the same set every day on Warped Tour. You have a half an hour, so you put the songs that are fire crackers back to back and that’s it. Some days, I will be on stage and I’ll lose myself in repetitive motion. It really had this startling effect. [It reminded] me that I’m actually alive on stage and these people actually care what I’m saying. It was one of the best shows.

Read more with Geoff after the jump.

Going on to the split with Envy. It seemed like you were talking about it for awhile. Was there a delay with it? Was it just a matter of getting the bands on the same page or label situations?

Geoff: When we started A City By The Light Divided, I was listening to Envy now stop. I had known about them for a long time but when I heard All The The Footprints and A Dead Sinking Story, I was amazed. I went to see them and met Jeremy [of Temporary Residence] and met those guys. We became fast friends and the idea of Envy coming on tour with Thursday was a big thing that kept coming up. There was the one tour with Rise Against where the two bands were picking the opening bands together. Rise Against was like, ‘I don’t know man. Nobody knows this band. They are singing in Japanese. I don’t know if this would be the tour for that.’ The next tour we offered them, they had already been in the country that year to play with Isis. They couldn’t get another visa to come that same year. Eventually, when we got out of contract with Island, we were like ‘shit, if this tour isn’t going to happen right now then maybe we should do a split while we are not on a contract.’ We just decided on October instead of September because we figured it would be more a set up for our full-length that will be coming out next year. The other thing that is cool about the split is that I picked the song names and when we picked an order, the song names formed a sentence. It turned out like a Red Sparowes record.

With the release of the record being predominately worked to indie stores and with you working with Temporary Residence, was this split seen as a move back to your roots?

Geoff: Being an indie band is all we ever wanted to be. It got so much bigger than that and we sort of lost control and focus for so long. It’s not like we’re going back to our roots; it’s just an adjustment in scale. We overshot our market and I’m glad we did it. It was really fulfilling and we did all this stuff that was fucking amazing. Now, that we have our fate and destiny in our hands. We control everything again [and] it’s not too big to manage. I want to be with people I like. I like a lot of people that own indie stores and I respect what they are doing and I want them to do well. It just seems right.

How’s everything coming with the full-length?

Geoff: It’s the same as everything for us. We started this record a year ago. We wrote, in the phase of two weeks, six songs that were killer. Tucker [Rule, drummer] went and played for My Chemical Romance for a few months. I went and did the United Nations record. We all kind of split off and did our own shit. We got back together and nothing worked. We couldn’t write songs. Two months went by and no songs. Another month went by, crummy songs. Then we started playing the songs we wrote last year and they got worse every time we played them. We went to the Philippines and when we got back, it was like we restarted again. ‘Ok, good songs are coming out and we’re killing the ones from last year.’ It’s a weird cycle because sometimes it’s like ‘man, maybe we should stop doing this band. This sucks.’ All the sudden, one little spark will happen. Right now, we’ve got sixteen songs for the full-length. We start recording August 11th. We could cut it down into a really slow record or the fastest, heaviest record we’ve done in years. The editing will determine what the album is.

I’m sure a ton of labels have come knocking on your door over the last year. What was it like going through that negotiation process again?

Geoff: It’s really nice but we’ve been free agents for a year and a half now. Sometimes you miss having that partner. When we first signed to Island, [they] were amazing. They had our back and they pushed us along. It was really comforting to know that there was someone there that was concerned about you.

We’ve decided on a label. It’s funny because [we currently have] the lawyers that fucked us when we got off Victory Records. They were so brutal to us. When we needed to get off Island, we were like, ‘man, we need a really good lawyer that’s going to kill for us. Why don’t we call the Victory lawyers and see if they’ll work for us?’ They are like rabid dogs. Except that we are finding people we want to work with, like Jeremy from Temorary Residence, and we’re like ‘go easy, he’s not trying to screw us.’ It’s such a weird world.

Anything else going on with Thursday for the rest of the year?

Geoff: We’ve talked about doing a digital singles club. Every month, every member gets a new song. That’s the thing we are looking to carry into our next situation. We’ve sold over a million records. We’ve played all these countries. We should be doing what we want and having fun.

Tags: Interview, Thursday //