Бывший фронтмен The Thermals Хатч Харрис выпустил новый альбом Under Crushing Rain

After releasing the album We Disappear in 2016, post-pop-punk band The Thermals more or less did exactly that. Frontman Hutch Harris broke up the band he had begun in 2002, when he assembled musicians to learn songs he had already recorded by himself. Now, 10 years after what was to be their final album, The Thermals are releasing a new record, Under Crushing Rain. For Harris, writing and recording are the true artistic expressions of being in a band. Even though he has released three albums as a solo artist (Only Water in 2019, SUCK UP ALL THE OXYGEN in 2022, and Not Everyone is Loved in 2024), he found that he missed writing and recording as The Thermals. Though, strictly speaking, there’s still no band, as such. Like The Thermals’ debut, Harris recorded Under Crushing Rain entirely on his own. The new album is not lo-fi like the first. Nevertheless, it has a tangible feeling of returning to the beginning. This may be splitting hairs, given that the band’s elements remained more or less consistent over the years. But as with many such bands, the sound inevitably got bigger, bolder. Under Crushing Rain distills The Thermals’ sound down to essentials: perky tempos, straightforward guitar strumming, simple lead parts, relentless melodicism, and Harris’s grinning, petulant voice. Opening with the quirky, snare-on-beats “Good Morning Fellow Scavengers,” a kind of post-apocalyptic pep talk, you’re reminded of the unique presence The Thermals had in the post-pop-punk world. Often political and confrontational, The Thermals took their stand at various points, notably on The Body The Blood The Machine. But Under Crushing Rain has the feel of someone shedding some armor. “Too much time is wasted with our family and friends,” Harris sings ironically in the opener. “We should be dead already, but the digging never ends/ How many breaths do we have left?/ We have the time to pray/ Instead, we spend it blowing dirt away.” Metaphor? Of course, there are the songs of socio-political import. At breakneck speed, “Now I Believe” skewers American Christianity, portraying a conversion based on wrath rather than grace. The anthemic “Spirit Collectors” warns against giving up to forces that would suck your soul dry of all that makes you special, and “A Dark, Dark Place,” the song that kicks the album into overdrive, seems hell-bent on finding out “how the Godless live” and “how it feels to not forgive.” But these songs are the exceptions that prove the rule: There’s a time when age calls every punk rocker to stop picking fights and do a little introspection. This seems like Harris’s time. “In the Flow” and “I Will be Delivered” picture the endurance of love, despite obstacles, and the jaunty pulse of “I Have Had Enough Blood” speaks of a perspective bigger than living for the fight (“When the world turns upside down, it doesn’t go to my head”). One of the album’s highlights, “On a Wind So High,” with its ebullient melody, finds Harris turning his back on a life spent “choking on the hate” and recognizing that “the hand I thought was controlling me/ I found it was holding me.” Even the closing title track, which recalls the dire, end-of-the-world imagery of the opener, conveys a kind of peace in hopelessness. “Under crushing rain I sat and prayed for your return/ Under crushing rain I watched a thousand cities burn/ I don’t think that you are ever coming back this way/ But I will die here waiting just the same.” Harris doesn’t give many clues as to who he’s singing to, but if ever there was a hymn for the agnostic, this could be it. Hopeless hope strikes a wistful chord as the song slowly fades out on an album that sparkles from start to finish, even though it feels more like an epilogue than a reunion.