Ian Mathers: Thursday are a band I’ve always vaguely appreciated from afar rather than engaging with directly, but if this is what they can do after 13 years of silence, I have to assume their peak is worth my time. I have known for a while that Geoff Rickly is one of our finest caterwaulers. He’s in fine form here over the high-tensile-strength structure that the rest of the band builds, and that’s before they shred it all in a thrillingly eviscerating breakdown. Snapping out of that back into the Edge-y guitar line and Rickly’s soaring “Have we seen enough?” (a particularly interesting choice of refrain for a band of this vintage) makes for one of the most stirring moments TSJ has brought me in 2024.
[9]
Brad Shoup: Lord love a duck, Rickly’s gone and written a National song with a metalcore breakdown? The Dessners should take a 13-year hiatus and come back with a Number Girl homage.
[6]
Taylor Alatorre: The screaming hits not just because it’s unexpected, but also because it’s deployed in a song where it isn’t strictly necessary. It isn’t mere affectation or genre convention — no tidy delineation of “clean” and “dirty” vocals here. The screams are a logical outgrowth of the song’s progression up to that point, but not an inevitable one. They’re simply one possible way that Rickly’s body, or anyone’s, might react to the environment that he and his band have placed it in, and to the memories they are fitfully reanimating. Wouldn’t you want to scream, the song invites you to ask, in those moments where mortality suddenly becomes more real than even the bleakest songs on Full Collapse had advertised? And might you be interested in an unbridled communal chant-along of “Spark! Moment!” to verify whether this is true?
[8]
Katherine St. Asaph: “Application for Release” almost sounds embarrassed to embrace its existence as an anthem. Also, the phrase “application for release” just reminds me of The Giver — which makes sense, because (spoilers for those who cut middle-school English class) this sounds drained of color and feeling.
[6]
Nortey Dowuona: Rejected. Good attempt though.
[4]
Leah Isobel: This feels startlingly rickety; its transitions from section to section have a strangely leaden quality, the soaring vocal and glimmering pools of guitar muddied by wimpy grey-toned percussion. Still, that awkwardness helps counterbalance the song’s self-seriousness. It’s human.
[5]
Jel Bugle: A route one rock anthem, sing along, knock it out of the park.
[8]
John S. Quinn-Puerta: Discussing this band with the Thursday scholar in my life, my dear friend Amanda, makes me think about art as legacy that captures a moment, a force, a culture, and freezes it in time. I saw Thursday a month and a half before they released this single. They played War All the Time in full, and the 21-year-old album felt as relevant as ever, down to the “copies and copies and copies.” The surprise release of “Application for Release From the Dream” in April, released by itself on their terms, felt like a coda. (Little did I know they would release “White Bikes” eight months later.) But I want to write not about the first time I heard this single, or the second, but the third. I saw the aforementioned Thursday scholar, in New Jersey, and they had picked up a limited, editioned version of this single on vinyl. Fresh off the plane, they told me they wanted to listen to it on my speakers and asked whether they could come over. I had been wanting to make a large amount of pasta, so it worked almost too perfectly. We had a single-release dinner party, sharing in food and in art. It was a moment, and it was a spark. As the dreamy synths started to stutter through, their shakiness belying the gang vocals and the perfectly timed and executed screams, the sheer togetherness was almost overwhelming. I don’t think we will ever have seen enough, but we will still hold on to each other.
[10]