In conversation with: Thumper
Who is Thumper?
Well, Thumper is a six-piece band. It's got two drummers and three guitarists; I was going to say big, stupid and loud. I feel like we potentially started off a bit more stupid than we've ended up. But yeah, it used to be just sort of me making weird lo-fi tapes, and now it's like a full-blown thing with two albums under our belt. In terms of genre, it's kind of like psych-rock-influenced pop.
You've recently released a new album which you've described as coming from a more paranoid headspace; what drove this headspace and did it change your usual direction of writing?
Well, the reason, as ever, is compulsive. You know, I just write songs and I need to get them out of my system, or I'll lose the plot. But when you're making records instead of putting out a couple of tapes, a couple of EPs, a couple of records of Thumper and some solo albums and stuff it's always just a reflection of where you were at that time. Sometimes not necessarily thematically because of the amount of time it takes to make something, to release it and all that. But, with this album, it took us years to make it. So, this is through COVID, through lots of crazy life pivots. And so, yeah, I would say Paranoid is one word to describe it, but that also isn't really representative of the entire time of making it either. Sometimes you can only really have perspective or really look at something when it's behind you, you know, so it's kind of more that we started making it at the beginning of COVID, basically, and all that ensued: all of the highs and lows of touring like crazy and kicking the shit out of each other and then falling in love with each other and all that goes into it. And then when you look back at it, you go, yeah, that does kind of sound like an insular record, but it's the sort of journey through that as opposed to wearing it as some sort of identity. You know, all this stuff is transient and it comes and goes the music is just a representation of that, I suppose.
After years of building your reputation through intense live shows, how are you planning to translate this new material onto the stage for the upcoming tour?
Well, with the first record, we were just touring like crazy and sort of – I wouldn't say rushed the whole process; it was truncated because it was right in between pre-COVID and COVID we finished that. But it was caught in between trying to be purely representational of the live show and then also showcase the music in a way that we felt was justified as being a recording. Like a weird pivot, but there are twomovies I saw this year that were films based on TV shows. One of them was The Mandalorian and Grogu, and one of them was Nirvana, the Band, the Show, the movie. But what struck me about the Star Wars one is that it did absolutely nothing to justify its format. You know, it didn't, nothing about it respected the audience and respected the people who were giving it its time, in this sort of four dimensional way, it didn't justify it being a film. It just didn't do it. Whereas the Nirvana film, which is like a previously I was not into it, and it's just a sort of obscure web series and then a thing for Vice. They made a film and then they decided that they hadn't justified it and they went back and rewrote it and re-shot it just to make sure that the conversation between the audience and themselves was like fully earned or something. And so anyway, it's a weird sidebar, but I feel it's necessary because the first album we were sort of caught in between what we're trying to do in terms of scope. And I feel like with this record, that was a big conversation in terms of we're not going to pile so many layers on this that you can't hear the band in the middle of it all. But we're also super conscious that this needs to be something that you can turn on, put on your record player or whatever. and feel the same or a comparable feeling to being at a Thumper show. And maybe even do some things that we can't do at a Thumper show, like those levels of intimacy.
Describe the importance of physicality within your set. Does sweat, movement and noise add to the music you're playing, especially with such a large band on the stage?
Thumper started off as just me and then I was releasing some tunes, starting to get book festivals, and made a band around that. It was just playing my songs and then it became a ‘band’ band. There were more than six people in the first couple of gigs, there were like anywhere between 10 and 15 people on stage and part of the reason for that had nothing to do with the music. It's just that, I'm not a front man in the way I don't feel like a front man when I'm making my breakfast, I don't identify with that energy. I don't throw my shoulders around a room. I keep myself small most of the time, for better or for worse. And it's more of a strength in numbers thing, because I love writing songs and I love playing live, but it was sort of terrifying. And then over the years, as the sort of what the band was and who the core members were solidified, we did sort of become a hive mind. But I would think that offstage, all of us are kind of like that, as in we're not like we are on stage. And so something happens like when we get up there where we just sort of lock into this frequency and it's a shared experience for us and it's hopefully shared with the audience, whatever that energy is. So for instance, at the beginning of our tour, we sold out this show in Scotland, and we went out and they were just planted on the ground. They were wedged to the rafters and everyone was buying t-shirts and stuff, but just planted. And in the past, I would have tried, I would have spent the entire gig trying to pull something from them that they didn't want to give me, and in the past that would've just totaled me. It's sort of a mood ring, you know, like it's changeable (my performance) and night to night it'll be different. And that's just something I'm more interested these days.
Has having two drummers changed your attitude towards this album’s live set?
At the beginning, it was an unintellectualized attempt at just brute force and energy. And because we had two drummers, I had to balance it out, so I had to have another guitarist. But very quickly, and especially in the early days, the shows were really chaotic. Like we were breaking things, the guitars were smashed and stuff was blown up like every single gig. And that was our reputation. Two drummers, explosions, it's a circus, you know? But the focal point for us, even then, has always been the songs. It felt like the balance was way out of whack, and it was just all of the visuals and the energy, and the songs were there just to fulfill that. And that just felt wrong to me. So at a certain point, we actually scrapped like half, if not more of our set in terms of songs and just started again. It kind of became my mission to have it so that when someone, say they didn't know who we are, and they walk into a room to watch the gig, maybe in the first minute they go, “oh, holy shit they've got two drummers and this crazy setup”, but I wanted it to be so that by a couple of minutes in, they're not thinking about it anymore because it's just everything is justified on stage, the songs being the thing that you're going to walk away with. Not through this novelty band of two drummers, and we kind of really doubled down on that with this record where with the first album.
How much of your music is instinct compared to precision? Is there an emotion that tends to get chased when songwriting?
I think probably the newest album is the time where the music and the lyrics in terms of process was the most synced in the sense that I definitely prescribed a kind of notion of write drunk, edit sober. I'll be inspired to write a song and lyrics matter more than any other element of the music. I'm very much like if the lyric is wrong, that'll just be a needle in my side that I will not be able to get over. You know, if a guitar tone isn't what I wanted, I'll get over it. So yeah, I'll just start a song and normally I'll get the bones of it there and then and then I'll spend the next, depending on the record, anywhere between six months and five years, chiseling it down and chiseling it down to get it more accurate to what I'm trying to convey. Last year, as well, I did a songwriting course with Adrienne Lenker and it was really amazing because she's just coming from a totally different world to me. I think she's one of the best living songwriters at the moment. A lot of it was all about challenging wordplay as a concept, and I realized my choice of lyrics between something really clever versus something honest, I will go for the more showy version of it. And I kind of didn't realize this until it was challenged in me because we had this exercise where, if you can imagine 3 verses with eight lines each and it was written as ‘metaphor, literal, literal, literal’ structure and it forced me every time to challenge my instinct to write something glib or some sort of dichotomy that says something about whatever the theme is. And it really was painful. But the song I got at the end of it was so emotional for me and it tapped into something brand new.
If Thumper spontaneously combusted tomorrow, what’s something you want to have say you've represented or left behind?
I think to get into the zone of thinking about what our legacy is, it would in some way be sort of like the death of flow a little bit because I then am thinking about, policing my own instincts based on some sort of target or something specific that I want for me. And so if we were to break up, I think it's just pretty pure and a tale as old as time, that we were just friends trying to make art and carve out a little place for ourselves, and for that to just be representative of something true about us and not purely for catharsis' sake. People probably would probably remember the craziness of the live show, and I think it's our attempt to hold space for both of those things as they kind of represent two sides of each of us as well, the super insular and the desire to share something meaningful. If that doesn't sound too highfalutin.