Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. This week, Max and Harry sat down with Jacob of Thornhill to discuss their new album, the process behind it, and the intention behind their newfound sound. Heroine is out now via UNFD, and you can find the album here.
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Jacob: This is definitely the most Thornhill we’ve felt so far, for sure.
Max: I’m definitely on the side of Heroine over The Dark Pool but I can see why people would be kind of hesitant at first. But I think that once you kind of accept the sound change it’s just so much more fucking cool.
Jacob: Thank you, dude. I don’t necessarily think it’s a big sound change. I think the mix is the thing that scares people, because we’re writing it like it’s like it’s a live rock band—that’s what we wanted from it. And I think that people are so accustomed to heavy bands being super polished. That’s the process and that’s the production. I get that, and it’s more of an acquired taste than I thought it was to people, but like, I think it makes sense for the album and we wouldn’t have done it any other way, so I guess we’ll find out.
Max: I guess we’ve already touched on this in that little introduction. The direction in terms of a sonic soundscape and mixing and songwriting, I feel is a pretty bold departure from a lot of things I see in metalcore and also The Dark Pool. I know you just said ‘I don’t think it’s that big of a sound change,’ but I think it feels like there is a different intention with Heroine versus The Dark Pool, or anything previous. What would you say the intention was with that?
Jacob: I think it was just to feel more comfortable in the idea of writing music as a band. [The Dark Pool was] the follow-up to Butterfly but I don’t really think Heroine is the follow-up to The Dark Pool. I think it’s just the album where we kind of found our footing as musicians, and as a group. Because it was the first time where we put more emphasis on how we’re going to play, how we’re going to look, how I’m writing these lyrics to get a point and a mood across rather than just singing about things, because there was just like a lot more thought gone into this rather than, ‘We need to follow up this record with something good.’ Definitely, we just didn’t have the jitters that we did on the first one, so there was a lot more freedom, I think. And obviously, COVID changed a lot for us. There was a lot of different song-writing processes. It was hard at first to figure out who we were gonna be and what we were gonna be, but we got there in the end and we definitely couldn’t have done it without that time.
Max: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the lyrics there, as well. It feels like there’s a heavy theme of like, femme fatales in film. Is that what the idea is with some of this? Lyrically, song-name wise at least, you’re calling back to a lot of older films and stuff. What was the lyrical theme or intention with that kind of element of the record?
Jacob: Well, I got a lot of inspiration from Baz [Luhrmann]’s Romeo and Juliet in the way that the script is written, so a lot of the lyrics were written in script form. So a lot of them are conversations between characters, and just like, the story in the song is moving with the sonic progression, and I really wanted to like… instead of working against Ethan and trying to, you know, flex on top of his flexing, like what The Dark Pool felt like, or what Butterfly felt like to me. It just felt too busy and too much. This time, I felt like working together and really finding our way from start to finish in the way we’re going to tell this story with these characters. So each song, definitely with a change of atmosphere, brings in new characters and new emotions and new feelings. It was something that we really wanted to have a go at. It was just… the lyrics, I think. Because the process changed with our writing, we kind of wrote a lot to film and to snapshots of imagery and things like that. Some of them were inspirations from things. I definitely feel like “Hollywood” has a lot of James Bond influence, in just the way that it’s very flippant about a love story that’s… ’Cause I feel like the whole James Bond thing is that he’s kind of a shit dude. Like he’s not the greatest dude, and he doesn’t really care, and you know, they do all that, and he’s sleezy and it’s gross, but that’s the whole point. That’s his whole character, and it was kind of, ‘that’s the character that we’re bringing to that song.’ It was really about owning the sound and the mood each time with the characters and the way I wrote the lyrics this time.
Harry: How much of the visual element, how big of a part did that play in the overall shaping of the album, and what was your main inspiration for it? For like the music videos, the artwork, just the whole packaging of the album.
Jacob: Well, it was definitely, the imagery was a big part of it. It was something I brought to Ethan pretty early on, ’cause we just talk about rock bands a lot, about what rock bands used to be. Like there was MTV, kinda grunge, rock bands. When heavy music was huge. When it isn’t what it is now in my opinion; I think it’s very pushed to the corner again, and it’s very hard to get… the whole thing is, I think a lot of people when they think about making metal or making heavy music popular, they just go to the whole generic term every time, and I think they really lose sight of what it means for our genre to be popular for a lot of people. And I think that that ’90s and early 2000s nailed the look and the character of heavy music, and it was something that we really wanted to touch on and bring back, because I think that was fucking cool. I think that was really cool when heavy acts just dressed however they wanted, wore whatever they wanted on their makeup, and they were a character on stage. No-one looked like each other, everyone was their own thing, and you’d go on stage and you’d know who they were. That was something that I talked to Ethan a lot about, because I just don’t see people doing that anymore, and I really wanted to see if we had the guts to do it, first of all, but also were able to pull it off. Costuming was a big one for me, because I’m very into fashion. Film was a big one, because I directed a lot of all the videos. I just wanted to nail every aspect of this to kind of showcase everything we’re after and what you can do. Because a lot of people were just telling me how big our budget was and how we’re selling out and stuff, but it wasn’t. We’re still a small Australian band. We made everything work, we just knew that there are ways to push it without spending a shit ton of money and being a massive band. So it was a lot of things.
Harry: I think a lot of people lose a lot of perspective when it comes to metalcore bands. Because you see the bigger metalcore bands and you think, ‘oh, they are bigger bands in the context of the wider music world, they’ve got a ton of budget,’ but you don’t. You have to stretch it, and obviously you’ve been able to take a lot of creative license and stuff to stretch that and make it really your own.
Jacob: It was a lot of the DIY aspect, because we’ve been doing DIY for our whole life. We built the set of “Reptile” when were like eighteen and nineteenth, kind of thing, and so we just keep carrying that with us, and we’ve just been DIYing everything.
Harry: Amazing. Just before I throw it back to Max, I wanna ask: you were saying about the costuming and the overall look of metalcore bands, even grunge bands and stuff, in the late 90s and 2000s. How do you see the more extreme kind of conceptualisations of costuming and stuff that like Sleep Token and Slipknot have been doing.
Jacob: Yeah, I love that. I think it’s really cool. I think Sleep Token are succeeding a lot because of that, as well as how good their music is and how good they are as a live band. I think that sort of character and bringing that sort of atmosphere and mood, especially to a show, you’re going to stand out immediately, good or bad, first of all. Then, on top of that, if you’re killing it live and you’re killing it in the studio, then people are gonna notice that just because it’s different, you know. We talk a lot about ‘is different good’ but I think, regardless, it’s always going to be good because it’s always going to be you pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, and that’s the important part of creativity in my opinion.
Max: You briefly touched on the idea that people look at what you’ve done with all these big extravagant, but DIY, music videos and the sound change, and I think the thing with a lot of metalcore fans… Obviously, we cover a lot of metalcore on this website, and I’m not trying to offend anybody, but I feel like people have a specific set of expectations for this kind of thing, and they kind of conflate someone doing something different with selling out in some regard. I feel like—this is sort of an opinion piece at this point—if you wanted to truly sell out, you could’ve just done The Dark Pool again and done exactly what everybody wanted.
Jacob: That’s what I think. It’s exactly how I think of it too, and we would never have felt good about that, and that’s why we didn’t do it.
Max: The thing is, not only is this record, like it feels like a more refined sound like you’re carving your own niche here, but arguably, this is even heavier than The Dark Pool was.
Jacob: That’s what I think!
Max: Instrumentally, it’s fucking dutty. You’ve got these eight string disgusting riffs, but I think people hear the power-y glam vocals over the top and they think, ‘Oh that must mean this is soft,’ because they don’t really know what they’re hearing. So in that sense, and this is a bold question, do you think at this present moment people are ready for something like Heroine, or is it going to be something that people look back on and go, ‘oh, maybe they were onto something with that.’
Jacob: That’s a good question because we do talk about that a bit. We’ve had some friends joke with us that it’s a bit like “Diorama” by Silverchair, where it’s like, people did not like that when it came out, but you listen to that record now and it’s genius. But we’re definitely not geniuses. Like I don’t think it’s that far out of, you know, we’re not doing something completely different. I think the whole issue is that people expected something from us and we didn’t give it to them in the way that they thought we would. And I think once people get over the fact that we didn’t they might come back. But I think the look as well has been scaring people, because if we did this sound but we did the basic look we were doing previously it may have been more of a softball for some people, and people might have got it. But I think because it was the full package it scared a lot of people, which I understand. It is something different, and it’s like, you see me in the “Where We Go [When We Die]” video and you see me in Raw, it’s very different. I’ve said this in an interview before, like, Thornhill is literally just you’re looking at a snapshot of our lives as people. We were young when we wrote, you know, Butterfly. We were nineteen when we wrote Butterfly and I’m twenty-four now, like I’m an adult now. I want more things, I want different things, I’m a different person now. You’re literally just looking at snapshots of our lives of who we are and what we enjoy, and we’re always going to keep moving regardless. I think people will get it. I hope people will get it.
Max: I hope so.
Harry: I think they will. I think, as Max says, they will probably not regard it well at first, categorically. I don’t think people will actually call it selling out like they’ve said from the singles, but I think it will take them a while to come around to it, and then they’ll retroactively go, ‘okay, I can see what they were trying to do there,’ and then it’s up to the person to rank it.
Max: I do think in some regard it’s a divisive record, but in the same vein I think all the best records that stand the test of time were divisive when they came out. So it’s one of those things where, yeah sure, people might have a bit of a sour taste in their mouth when it comes out, but I feel like, like I said, in time people can look back, and I think people will go, ‘Oh shit, maybe that was exactly what I needed,’ kind of thing, or ‘that’s exactly what I need now.’ But I think, in general, a lot of people just… I don’t think they know what they want with this kind of sound until they’re given it, so I think it’s something they’ve got to warm up to.
Jacob: I just think it needs a shakeup. I just think the genre needs a bit of something, and I think there are a lot of bands doing that right now, bands like Loathe, obviously, and Sleep Token, and Static Dress, and like, even Void [of Vision], especially now, are doing that too, where we’re all just trying to package and deliver the genre in a way that is going to bring it forward rather than keeping it where it is. I guess a lot of people don’t want that, which is interesting, but I don’t think it’s up to them because, if anything, and this is how I’m trying to look at it, the metalcore fans that we’re going to lose we’re going to gain in rock fans. And I think the rock industry has always been really good in having a broad audience and a really broad amount of fans, because a lot of things are classed as rock, and that’s fine. I don’t concern… Thornhill, personally, doesn’t really concern what genre we’re in. It doesn’t matter to us. Yes, everyone’s going to say that the record is for metalcore fans, that’s what we were, etcetera, but I didn’t even know what metalcore was until we released Butterfly, and people told me that this is metalcore and I had to look it up. I’d never heard of metalcore before, and it’s just not something I give a shit about. I don’t want to categorize my own band. This is what Thornhill’s deciding to do now. If it’s not for you it’s not for you and that’s completely fine. That’s what music is. You can listen to The Dark Pool again if you want, you can completely forget us because we’re not your thing. I don’t mind. It doesn’t hurt me because I understand that’s how music is, but I don’t write anything for anyone. We just write what we think what we’re missing, and if people understand it then that’s the bonus on top.
Max: Yeah, I don’t know. I think the record is fantastic, but it’s just one of those things where I think people are going to be weird about it for a while.
Jacob: It makes sense as an album, though, I think, a lot more than the singles do.
Max: In the context of the record all the singles make a lot of sense, as well. It just feels like it flows in a natural way. I think, given the singles being released in the order they have, I think people haven’t got a sense of how the album flows, but it flows extremely well.
Jacob: That’s what we wanted.
Max: ’Cause you’ve written a lot of these songs, like you say, like a script for a movie. It does feel like we’re going through a natural motion with peaks and valleys and all that. But also, in terms of song-writing, like you said, I think confining yourself to a genre when you’re writing is the worst thing you can possibly do for your own creativity. Like, there is no way you’re going to write exactly what you want to by going, ‘Okay no, right now I’m going to write a metalcore song. Right now I’m going to write this.’ That’s so clearly not what you did with this album given the breadth of things you’re doing here. Like the difference between a song like “Leather Wings” being a more weird, freakish metalcore kind of song, but then you’ve got like “Raw” which has this big Arctic Monkeys, almost, on an eight string riff. I love that bit.
Jacob: Yeah, I love that! I love that you picked that up.
Max: Was that what it was meant to be?
Jacob: Absolutely.
Max: Because the first time I heard that, I was like, ‘this sounds like someone is playing an Arctic Monkeys riff on an eight string and I fucking love it.’
Jacob: One-hundred percent. You get everyone saying ‘Muse-core’ and I’m like, ‘What?’ No, it’s not even close. It’s Arctic Monkeys as.
Max: That’s fucking sick. I’m glad that’s been solidified in my mind now. I will not forget that. I guess on a different note, you mentioned Sleep Token and Loathe. You worked with George Lever on this record, and his mixes are now—as much as you could argue they’re an acquired taste—legendary for what he’s done with bands like Loathe and Sleep Token. What was it like working with him?
Jacob: Yeah, he’s created a signature [sound]. It was difficult because of communication through the lockdowns and through FaceTime and stuff, because we wanted something super specific in a short amount of time, you know what I mean? You know how cut-off dates are. It’s really hard to make everything work exactly when you want it to work, and ’cause of all the lockdowns we could barely track drums. We tracked drums in a garage. We got given extremely short hands in every circumstance and we kind of had to make do with as much as we could because Australia was just so fucked with everything. Then once we did that, we kind of just gave him everything and were like, ‘Fix this please,’ and he did his absolute hardest. We got on a lot of FaceTimes and sent him a lot of paragraphs of notes but he was lovely about it and he did a really good job and it was great working with him. He’s a lovely dude and he can deadlift a lot.
Max: I’m not surprised about that.
Harry: He actually lives about ten minutes from me so one day I will walk into him.
Jacob: Oh really? Go say hi to him for me.
Max: Did [George Lever] push you in any specific way in the record, out of your comfort zone? Like ‘I think you should do this instead.’ Did he have any input on how the album ended up turning out?
Jacob: Uh no, ’cause it was all self-produced first. We always self-produce, so everything was already done before he mixed and mastered it.
Max: Oh wow okay, that’s cool. I mean, given the circumstances you were under, the way the record turned out is pretty astounding. This is going to be a bold thing to say because it’s probably not what you’ve been hearing, but I fucking love the mix on this record.
Jacob: I do, too! I don’t get it.
Max: I think it sounds exactly what I wanted it to sound. Like I know a lot of people are like, ‘the vocals are too quiet,’ but the vocals now feel like a texture within the entire soundscape of the record as opposed to being like the frontrunner.
Jacob: Exactly. They’re another instrument, which is what we wanted from it. But I really don’t think they’re too quiet at all. I really don’t understand that. I think they just sit in a place that people aren’t used to, and you have to pay attention. It’s not just easy.
Max: It’s not just mindless music that you can put on and hear it.
Jacob: Yeah. Which I don’t think most bands are. It’s just different. In terms of this record, I want you to read the lyrics. I want you to understand the characters. I want you to sit down and listen to what we’re trying to show you, because I say this a lot, but I just think because the way the world is, these days especially, everything is so readily available, everything is so you eat it and vomit it out the next day. Everything is just there for you, and I really miss what albums used to be and how important they used to be as a whole thing. We pride ourselves very much on being an album band, and I really just want people to have to sit on this one and listen to it maybe once or twice to understand it, or to get it. And if you don’t, then obviously that’s fine, but I really want people to try and I want it to be a big deal like it used to be. Whether or not that happens, I guess we’ll find out. Mixed reviews so far.
Max: I hope it happens. I mean, I’ve listened to like twenty-five times, I think.
Jacob: Let’s go! What’s your favourite song?
Max: Oooh, can I give you three? “Raw”, “Heroine”, and “Leather Wings”. There’s my top three.
Harry: Those are also my top three.
Max: I love a good closer. So “Heroine” being the way it is just really fucking works for me. Also, “Varsity Hearts”… fucking awesome.
Jacob: I love that song. I reckon that, if anything, that’s the song people aren’t going to get, and I hate that because it’s my favourite one.
Max: I can already see the comments, like ‘this sounds like“Two-Way Mirror” by Loathe.’
Jacob: Oh, does it?
Max: Nah, I don’t think it actually does, but it’s got that vaguely shoegazey sound to it, and anytime anyone does that it’s like, ‘This is Deftones, this is Loathe, this is whatever.’ They don’t know how to make a point without associating with something. In terms of the whole record [though], what are you most excited to play live? I know you played the album in full in Australia but you’re going around the world this year. What are you most excited to play for people?
Jacob: Uh, it depends on what we’re allowed to play. It’ll really come down to what gets popular, because people aren’t gonna sit through the songs that obviously don’t do as well. We have noticed, though, that “Raw” is really fun to play live which is lucky, because it probably will always be the one we play. And “Casanova” too. It’s been funny touching on what you said before, as people have come up to us before—because we played “Casanova” at Full Tilt in Australia and we played “Casanova” at the entire America tour we just did, and everyone would come up to us after and be like, ‘oh, I take back what I thought and said. That song was so heavy and so tough.’ And we were like, ‘Yeah! We know.’ It’s so funny that it took a live setting to show people, but that’s also what gives me hope for this record too, because it’s a live record and I think people will understand what we’re doing when they hear it live, too. I think that’s definitely going to help. But I really wanna play “Varsity [Hearts]”. Ethan sings on “Varsity” too.
Max: Please play “Varsity”.
Jacob: I know, I wish. I don’t think people are going to like it.
Max: I think people are going to like that one, I really do. I think people are really going to like that one, and I think they’re also going to like songs like “Blue Velvet” as well. I think people are really, really going to connect with those. I can’t speak for anybody else, though. It’s a hard thing, and we won’t know until it’s out, but I’m so excited to hear what people think. I’m definitely ready to hop into some comments sections and tell people to shut the fuck up.
Jacob: Please do! Because we’re not allowed to.
Max: I’ll be your secret PR guy.
Harry: The one for me that was most obvious was “Something Terrible [Came with the Rain]” for obvious reasons, because it’s such a different soundscape. Obviously I won’t do too many spoilers but you know, the whole nature is completely different. How did you construct that, and was there any reservations to actually putting that as a fully-fledged song on the record?
Jacob: The whole point of it was that the album is set up like a theatre performance, so it has an Act One and an Act Two, and “Something Terrible Came with the Rain” is the intermission. So it’s the one to separate and give you that breather between the two sections, and so I always wanted it on the record. Just because Ethan wrote it one day to this little clip of a theatre kind of performance, and it was always this big thing because I really wanted to put on a play and do a big thing, and it was when we were really in the creation of it. He just wrote it all and I was like, ‘What the fuck is this? This is insane. How did you just do this?’ He was like, ‘Ah, it’s all right,’ and I was like, ‘What do you mean? This is going on the record.’ And then that kind of formed a lot of the other ideas afterwards, so it was really cool to just build on that whole theatrical side from there.
Max: I just love how gorgeous that interlude is.
Harry: It’s just so gorgeous, yeah. I don’t even treat it as an interlude at this point.
Jacob: Yeah, I don’t think it is, too. Exactly. That’s why it’s like an intermission, a little break, but you want to be in the break.
Max: I do have one last question. It’s a fun one, though.
Jacob: Hit me up.
Max: When are you covering a Lana Del Ray song?
Jacob: Ooooh, I could do that. That would be fun! Yeah, she’s got a similar energy to what we do.
Max: I was hoping that when you did that Triple J thing, in my mind I was trying to channel, ‘Please do a Lana Del Ray song.’
Jacob: Oh, where were you? You should’ve let us know that!
Max: I’ve been trying to astral project it. You’ve gotta do that, man. Do like “Venice Bitch” or something, man.
Jacob: It was really hard, that whole thing. I would’ve loved to, man. It’s just like, we were in between touring and finishing the album and trying to do a Like a Version, so we were kinda like, ‘We’ll just play on the meme and do this [covering Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole”] because we know we’ll do it well.’
Max: I like that cover, to be fair. It was a good cover.
Jacob: It was all right. Like I wanted to do… We had two others, and we were talking about doing “Maneater” by Nelly Furtado ’cause that would’ve been really fun, and I wanted to do “Greatest View” by Silverchair, maybe. There was a couple.
Harry: I did laugh when I saw it was Muse. I was just like, ‘There’s no way they’ve done this without a nod to the meme.
Jacob: It’s a good meme!
Max: It is a good meme. Just lean into it, fuck it. What are they gonna do, just cry more?
Jacob: Yeah, fuck ’em. But they didn’t so yeah.
Max: But yeah no, “Venice Bitch” by Lana Del Ray. Anything from Ultraviolence, please. I beg of you.
Jacob: It’s in the bank now. It’s definitely there.
Harry: I don’t know if you have a couple more minutes, it’s up to you, but I did have one more question. You said about like, you are a record band. You were doing EPs at the start, obviously to facilitate like where you wanna go. As a small band it’s kind of a concession you have to make, but it’s become more popular now that bands just make EPs. Are you ever considering doing some more experimental stuff in the context of an EP that is kind of separate from the discography, or is it just albums now?
Jacob: I think it’s just albums now. That’s really where we’re at. I think the trajectory of where we’re at now and what we’re going to become with this record is definitely gonna be something we’re going to bring onto the next record. I definitely want to continue trying to push heavy music again, and really making albums important. I think that’s definitely something that’s really on our radar of things to do. I mean, we have side projects and we have other things that we’ll be doing in between and things like that, but in terms of Thornhill it’s definitely going to be albums for us.
Harry: I’m an album listener, so I’m down for that.
Max: I’m a big album guy. With this as well, especially, every time I’ve put it on I’ve had to listen to the whole thing. Like I don’t just click on a specific song. Actually, that’s a lie: I did put “Raw” on on its own a few times, but as a whole I do just love listening to this whole thing. It’s fucking awesome.
Harry: I do not think I have listened to this [holding up The Dark Pool vinyl] without going through the full thing.
Jacob: Is that the instrumentals?
Harry: Yeah, it has the instrumentals on it as well.
Jacob: That’s so rude! You’re literally talking to the vocalist right now, man.
Harry: Yeah, well… I mean, your vocals aren’t even in the new album; they’re so far back in the mix.
Jacob: That’s true. It’s actually muted, man.
Harry: But no, like, literally, I don’t think I’ve put on a song from this and not listened to the entire album.
Jacob: That’s lovely, thank you.
Max: I’ll let you go, because I think we are over time now, but it’s been lovely talking to you. Thank you for spending your evening with us.
Jacob: Of course! Thanks for having me.
If you enjoyed the interview, don’t forget to check out Thornhill‘s new album, Heroine, which is out now via UNFD. You can find the album and all relevant links here.