Reflecting on the relationship between nature and humanity and all the fragments in between, Thrice assembled their 11th album, Horizons/East (Epitaph) throughout the lockdown in 2020. Working through individual pieces remotely, the band kept studio time down to small bursts, jamming out ideas, then taking them home to flesh out. Mostly written following the band’s 2018 release Palms, Horizons/East also took some new form as it unraveled around the trying year.
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“There’s always bits and pieces that are kind of floating around that are older and get picked up,” Lead singer Dustin Kensrue tells American Songwriter. “We gather material over time, and then as it reaches a critical mass, we start sharing all that with each other and starting to play out each other’s ideas, combining them, and building them up.”
Writing within the band, the collaborative effort leaves each song open to reinterpretation as the lyrics come in. “I think because we all write, it’s rare that one song just pops out from one of us since we’re usually blending multiple people’s ideas. Then we’ll jam on whatever we put together and take another step as we evolve it, so it’s usually a longer process.”
Over time, the songs end up having a story it has to tell. “It isn’t about content necessarily, but it has dynamics and emotion and a flow,” says Kensrue. “I really try to pay attention to the song and let that inform what the lyrics are actually about, and that’s a huge part of the way I write now.”
Incorporating jazz quartal chords, and experimenting with guitar riffs pressed from the Fibonacci sequence, a numerical pattern used in the earliest mathematics, Horizons/East forms a meditative trip, from the opening “The Color of the Sky,” a track Kensrue calls a mini picture of moving from a place that’s bounded and closed off to opened horizons. “Every time you take a step the horizon changes and new things present themselves to you,” he says.
Coalescing the forces of nature with the natural state, Horizons/East unfolds around twisting guitars on the hitting “Scavengers” into the dreamier scope of “Northern Lights.” The sharper strikes of “Summer Set Fire to the Rain” and the brooding brew of “Still Life,” ebbing and flowing along to the piano close of “Unitive/East.”
Intricately arranged, the instrumentation is the soul of Horizons/East. “It’s hard to draw the thread between them [the songs] because it’s a pretty diverse record, sound-wise and instrument-wise,” says Kensrue. “For whatever reason, it feels cohesive to me, and it all makes sense together.”
Recounting someone telling him Horizons/East is a “soothing record,” Kensrue says it’s not far off. “There is a meditative quality to a lot of it, even some of the heavier stuff.”
Thematically, Kensrue landed on horizons, which he says took on gravity, and pulled in other related concepts, shaping the storyline of the album. “Eventually everything gets shifted and changed by the relationship to the larger theme,” says Kensrue. “In this case, it ended up being that picture of horizons and using that as a metaphor for the way that we see the world, and the ways that we refuse to see it or can’t see it, as it’s presenting itself to us in each moment.”
He adds, “It’s dealing with the world views that we create to simplify life for us and how those cause us to miss things, and misconnections. We can miss out on things that are kind of staring us in the face.”
Now more than 20 years since forming the band with guitarist Teppei Teranishi, bassist Eddie Breckenridge, and drummer Riley Breckenridge, Kensrue says its all part of his DNA now.
“It’s hard to separate it from the fabric of the rest of my life because it’s been there since I was 18,” says Kensrue. “It’s a part of the larger picture of what my life is and less an added-on thing. It’s another family. It’s a job, but it’s also a huge passion, and still is.”
