THURSDAY

For the last thirteen years, THURSDAY has been in a constant state of transition. Rising from New Brunswick, NJ, in the midst of a DIY basement culture revival, they seemed out of step with the traditional hardcore of their peers. Favoring jagged post-punk rhythms over metallic breakdowns and quoting from Neil Young and post-modern poet, Michael Palmer, instead of Henry Rollins and Noam Chomsky, the band always seemed at odds with the awkwardly applied label of "post-hardcore pioneers". With this starting point, they set out wildly to find their place in the world: touring with everyone from The Cure to Cursive, continually expanding and refining their musical vocabulary. Finally, with 'No Devolución', the transition feels complete: THURSDAY have arrived at a place like home.

When THURSDAY released 'Full Collapse' it defined a genre, signaled a change of the guard and started a backlash all at once. Spin hailed the band as “The Next Big Thing" featuring vocalist Geoff Rickly on its cover in 2004. Kerrang praised the band with five K's (highest marks) as being "in an entirely different class" than anything else at their Reading festival debut. THURSDAY's first album for the majors, 'War All The Time', was a critical and commercial success but left the band feeling stuck and uninspired. Instead of embracing the musical niche that they had carved out, they took a far more daring route: shaking off trends in favor of experimentation, forging identity from content rather than style and turning THURSDAY into a churning engine of reinvention. 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."

"There is literally nothing that I've ever experienced, that comes close to being in a room and watching the musicians in Thursday write together," says Rickly, crediting the band's chemistry on the steadiness and endurance of its line-up. "It's too powerful and immediate for us to walk away from."

It's fitting then that the theme of 'No Devolución' is undying devotion. "Writing music is like shining a light through a prism: it refracts, illuminates and magnifies your thoughts until they find clarity," Rickly explains. "These twelve songs are the individual colors that came out when we shined the light of devotion through the prism of our band." Adding, with a self-conscious laugh, "It sounds kind of ridiculous when you say it out loud but it's what we've made and that's just who we are." Maybe this contains the key to THURSDAY's unlikely success. They're a band smart enough to know the risks of being sincere in a cynical, irony-filled world and take them anyway; a band that puts it all on the sleeve but can still take it on the chin.

None of this would matter if 'No Devolución' wasn't so relentlessly jaw-dropping. Nearly every song on the record is a revelation for the band, repeatedly opening doorways to new rooms for the band to enter and then blow the roof off of. "This isn't a hardcore record," Rickly muses. "It's not punk. But it's a Thursday record and it might be our best." 'No Devolución' comes out ten years after THURSDAY's landmark album, 'Full Collapse', and provides a powerful touchstone for the future of the band.