Australian metalcore favourites Thornhill have released their third studio album, BODIES.
The album is the eagerly anticipated follow-up to 2022’s Heroine, which reached No. 3 on the ARIA Albums Chart.
BODIES is billed as a release thriving on “spontaneity and freedom” and offering “an unbridled explosion of raw vulnerability fused with some of the band’s heaviest moments to date.”
“BODIES marks a bold evolution in our ever-developing sound,” the band explain. “Heroine was defined by its meticulously crafted and tightly woven concept, but the weight of this careful construction sometimes overshadowed the energy of the music itself, leaving some listeners feeling disconnected.
“With BODIES, we have embraced a more immediate, unfiltered approach that feels like a lightning bolt, looking to capture the energy of Thornhill right now.”
To celebrate the release, Rolling Stone AU/NZ sat down with vocalist Jacob Charlton and guitarist Ethan McCann to talk all about it.
Thornhill’s BODIES is out now via UNFD.
BODIES Track by Track:
1. “DIESEL”
Jacob Charlton: “DIESEL” was a one take really, wasn’t it?
Ethan McCann: Pretty much a one take. It was a riff and a little sample, and that was all it was until we started recording in [Ben] Maida’s living room. We had done the first couple of tracks, we’d finished the first iteration of “under the knife”, and the first iteration of “Revolver”.
It was around 2am, and it was just Jacob, myself and Sammy B [Sam Bassal], our producer, up late, massively overcooked from trying to write the whole day – and Maida was asleep on the couch behind us, missing the whole thing. We just stuck this weird chorus onto what we had, then we were like, “Where do we go from here without it being too fancy, but still keeping it interesting?”
Then we flipped the riff around, repeated it, and we cut it off with this super short and sweet song. We’ve never really done that before, but we all really loved it. It was our favourite song for a little while, our collective favourite song. It was just so much fun to write. It was so random, and it was just so quick and to the point – we’ve never been about that before. It’s always been this sort of extravagant storytelling melodic masterpiece sort of thing. But with “DIESEL”, this was just quick and dirty.
2. “Revolver”
Jacob: This one’s a metalcore song, and it was a very, very old demo from [2022 album] Heroine days, the transition period. I was always against it, but the boys absolutely loved the breakdown and the beat, and I know Maids and Cage were pushing Ethan to do it. They were like, “You need to make this a song, you need to make this a song!” And then he did. And they loved it. But then Ethan didn’t like it, and I didn’t like it – but we did know it was good. So, we had to finish it!
We had an idea for it, and we laid it all out for Sammy, and he loved it. We just couldn’t like it for a long time, it was like “eat your fucking vegetables” finishing that song. It was such a long and drawn-out process of us changing such minute bullshit that did not matter, like a chord progression for the chorus to make it feel different; but it wouldn’t really change anything. We knew that we had a good chorus anyway, but it just still wasn’t right. But I’m pretty happy with where we got it. I think the blood, sweat and tears of trying to shape that into what it became was worth it. It was probably the hardest song to finish.
3. “Silver Swarm”
Jacob: “Silver Swarm” is old “Valentine”. It’s the first iteration of “Valentine” from Heroine (2022).
Ethan: Oh, of course! I forgot how that happened. Initially when we were writing, we thought about doing this because the “Valentine” that is on Heroine is a very different song than what it first started out as. It ended up being a sort of lo-fi rendition of it. It was initially a full song, a full band with instruments and everything. There was a lot of gold in that track, and a lot of things that we really liked about it… but we just couldn’t get it over the line for Heroine. And we wanted to come back to it and reshape it to maybe put it on this album.
Jacob: Yeah, give it the love.
Ethan: But again, we just couldn’t really crack it. Jacob’s chorus was always really, really solid, and we fucked around with different versions of the chorus, playing with synths as opposed to chords and just trying to show it in a different light so we could take it somewhere.
Jacob: Oh true, it was an old demo!
Ethan: Yeah, and it ended up being this synth chorus. And for us it was like, “This chorus is one of the sickest choruses we have, we just don’t know what to do with it.”
Jacob: And it had a hard tempo.
Ethan: Yeah, it was a hard tempo for a long time. Then on one of the last days of recording, I was listening to Spotify on the way to Maida’s, and I heard a similar beat. I think it was Fontaines D.C., the title track to Skinty Fia, and the beat just clicked something in my head. So I just put a dumb riff over it, then we stuck the chorus on – and that was the whole song!
4. “Only Ever You”
Jacob: “Only Ever You” was also an old demo.
Ethan: That was two different demos!
Jacob: Yes, two old demos. I think the chorus also came from the transition period between [2019 debut album] The Dark Pool to Heroine, that kind of vibe. We had that chorus for a while, and I was bugging Ethan to make that something because I always loved it – but I didn’t know why. It was one of those ones where it was just an idea and we were like, “Okay, it’s fine.” It just never made it anywhere else. But it stuck with me for years. And I feel like if you’re not sick of something for that amount of time, it’s time for that idea.
It’s like that Rick Rubin saying, you’re an antennae to the universe in a sense. And if you’re not going to pursue an idea, it’s going to find its person or it’s going to find its outlet through somebody else. And I guess that was one of our own that we weren’t ready for. But once we had all of the pieces to that puzzle, it just kind of blew out. I think the structure of that one was a bit shit, we’ve never done three choruses before and that was a pretty hard pill to swallow for us. We’ve always been very against repeating too much, and we had a second verse. Fuck, we hate a second verse!
Ethan: Oh dude, second verses are my Achilles’ heel. Our Achilles’ heel. But it’s so weird because three choruses within a song, especially nowadays, is such a common thing. Any song you listen to will have at least three choruses. And I think for us, it’s just never felt necessary, or we’ve almost not wanted to do it just out of spite. It’s like: everybody else is doing it, so we’re not doing it!
Jacob: “It feels lazy!”
Ethan: Probably not though. If it’s good, it’s good.
5. “fall into the wind”
Ethan: “Fall into the wind” was just a random thing I threw together one day. I think I was struggling to write and I just wrote this really simplistic atmospheric thing. And I don’t know how it came to be on the album, I don’t know how we put these two together.
Jacob: I think we liked it heaps, and we were like, “Oh yeah, a little break is probably necessary.” And we liked how jarring it was going into “TONGUES” because it didn’t sonically work. But that was actually what we liked about it.
Ethan: Yeah, I agree.
Jacob: Like a “calm before the storm” kind of vibe. It’s fun.
6. “TONGUES”
Jacob: I don’t even remember this one.
Ethan: I think you went home? We wrote “TONGUES” the morning after we did “BODIES”, which we renamed “DIESEL”, the night before. You and I ended up staying over at Maida’s, we went out for breakfast, and I was like, “We gotta keep cooking.” And you were like, “I need a fucking shower.” So you went home and showered, and me and Sammy just sat in the sauce, in the same clothes from the night before. We had this old riff and that was kind of it! It felt like we blinked and two hours passed when Sammy and I nutted out this song. Jacob came back and was like, “That’s sick, I’m gonna throw some vocals on it.”
Jacob: We pretty much tracked on it straight away. But that chorus was probably the most work. It was the most I’d probably been pushed to come up with a catchy melody over a really hard chord progression.
Ethan: Oh yeah, you hated me that day!
Jacob: I hated you. I was just like, “Yeah, of course you would choose the hardest fucking thing to do. How am I going to make something good, we don’t have enough time, I’m fucking shit.” But I couldn’t be more thankful for it, really, because it was such a good push. I think it worked out so well in hindsight. It was a really, really good push of my creativity, and I think we came up with something pretty cool. And I want to do it more now.
Ethan: I think for the chords in that song, they sound quite dark and heavy, it almost has a weird death metal vibe to it. And in those sorts of songs you would usually just hear super harsh scream vocals over it, so I think forcing Jacob to do some sort of clean chorus was definitely a massive challenge. But he killed it. It was sick.
Jacob: We got there.
7. “nerv”
Ethan: Oh, that one was funny.
Jacob: Oh my god, that one wasn’t funny at the start though. How many demos?
Ethan: I can’t remember? I do remember you were trying to finish a couple of demos that also didn’t make it. You were doing some demos downstairs and we were like, “Okay, the album’s pretty good.” We had eight demos or so, and we were like, “We need one more big heater, we need another banger.” Jacob was down doing vocals in the living room, and I was upstairs in his vocal space trying to write a different song. I wrote one, then the boys listened to it at lunch. They were like, “Yeah, it’s cool. It’s not bad.” But I knew what they were saying, I knew that it wasn’t that good. So after lunch I tried again to do something else, Jacob went back and did more vocals, and I came up with the first half of “nerv”.
I remember I wanted something in the same tempo and the same beat as a Travis Scott song, I was listening to “FE!N” or something like that by Travis Scott. I didn’t even really like that song, it was just that the rhythm and the tempo was so cool, and it was something that we hadn’t scratched on the album yet. I literally made a drum loop that sounded like a Travis Scott song, and then just wrote a riff over it. And then we turned it into “nerv”.
8. “Obsession”
Jacob: “Obsession” was a deep cut. I think this one shows a different version of us a bit. We really wanted to push new music out and we wanted to care a bit less about putting it out. I think, at that time especially, we had such a big weight on our shoulders, being like, “It has to be perfect in every single avenue.” But it doesn’t, because, I mean… who cares in general!
I think we wanted to see and test what was happening, so we wrote “Viper Room”, which was very much inspired by The Killers and Arctic Monkeys, that’s what we were listening to at that time. And then “Obsession” was the shoegaze part of us that we were listening to at the time. Really, we just wanted to see where the endorphins were. And I thought it was going to be “Viper Room”, but we just couldn’t get it to where we wanted it.
When we finished “Obsession”, we were all like, “Yeah, this is cool.” And then we played it live, and we realised, “Oh yeah, this is what we want to keep going with!’ But it was a slog.
Ethan: “Obsession” was also the first full demo we had after Heroine.
Jacob: It was the first time we jammed something out in a room as well.
Ethan: And Heroine came out in June of 2022, and I think we did our first US tour in March or April. I wrote “Obsession” the week after we got back from that tour.
9. “CRUSH”
Ethan: The first beat of that song, and the vibe of that song, started in a catering room in Paris at the venue while we were on tour with Silent Planet. I needed to write something just for the sake of writing something. If it was a Thornhill song? Sick. If it was just something fun? Sick. I had my little in-ear receiver, the little thing you strap to your belt. I just smacked that on the table and recorded it with my phone and clicked it a bunch of times. And I had this random audio file that was just the noise of clicking, then I put it in a sampler and made that beat and just repeated it as a drum loop. Then I added kicks and snare over it to accentuate the parts that I wanted to. It was really cool, initially I was like, “Oh, it’d be cool if this opened the next album,” because it was just a little vibey piece. But it just stayed being this one and a half minute jam for ages. And Jacob threw some vocals on it initially, and it was sick, but it was still just this one and a half minute thing.
And it wasn’t until the week of mixing that we were like, “No, this needs to be a full song.” And Jacob was like, “I can drive.”
Jacob: I had a couple of different ideas about where to take it. We’ve actually never really worked together instrumentally before, and on songs like “Silver Swarm” and this, it was both of us cooking instrumentally. We had to kind of find our footing on how to do that, but I think we both enjoyed the process of it. I felt imposter syndrome a little bit with this one, because I was like, “Ethan’s made such a cool idea, and everything I’m coming up with is so fucking shit. Am I taking it in a direction where I hear it one way, but it isn’t what he’s hearing?” And I was questioning, “Is that Thornhill? I don’t know?!” There were so many doubts with it. At the time, Cage was a big help. He’s such an excited and good person to be around for writing, he’s always like, “Yeah, that’s sick!” And you’re just like, “Oh, thanks man!”
Ethan: “Thanks, Cage!”
Jacob: Yeah, thanks, Cage! It was just cool to throw some shit in there and just vibe it. But it was very much an “on death’s door knock” with that one. I think we just had to get it done whether we liked it or not. And if you’re not scared, you’re not doing it right.
10. “under the knife”
Jacob: This one’s had some iterations!
Ethan: A different version of “under the knife” was the second song we finished for the album that was initially called “Lush”. It was very different, it was in a completely different key, with a completely different structure. And it just wasn’t really good enough. The original riff sounded too much like this really old deep cut Limp Bizkit song that was in the back corner of my mind. And then I realised, “This needs to change.”
Jacob: I just couldn’t make anything work over it. I was like, “Dude, I don’t know what’s happening, I just can’t get there.” We finally got it there though!
Ethan: Yeah, that was the one where Maida was just about to start recording drums, and we shuffled the whole thing around. It sort of fucked with him, but we got it there. And fun fact about the start of that song and the main synth hook: I found out that “Idioteque” by Radiohead, one of my favourite songs of all time, sampled this really old experimental electronic song from the ’70s. So I found that 20-minute song, sampled a different part of it – and that’s what that is.
11. “For Now”
Jacob: This was originally an interlude to the final song, but we thought the final song was mid. We liked the interlude, and we really did not have enough time to make it a full song – but we did it anyway! And that’s what “For Now” is. I think we always have a bit of a soft spot for the album opener and the album closer, and with the amount of energy and attitude that the intro had for this album, we wanted to round it out. But by the end of the process, we got a bit tired of the energy.
Ethan: All gas, no brakes.
Jacob: Yeah, all gas, no brakes. We were like, “Actually, you know what? Maybe some brakes would be good because we can’t stop right now!” And “For Now” kind of allowed that. I think we started to get back into the soundscape-y stuff by then, probably a little bit too late. But that was probably the most upfront, personal sounding song we’ve done in a while. It was just supposed to be all vibe. Sammy really gassed that song in the end, which probably got us over the line with it!
Ethan: Sammy was freaking out, he was trying to stick to the original song that was completely different just for the sake of not changing anything because we were just about to mix it. And then by the time we scrapped that version together, he was convinced, on board, and very excited.
