Philadelphia Weekly

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Guitarist Tom Keeley doesn’t have much to say about Thursday’s “really unremarkable” first show, but based on what he remembers, the second one sure sounds like it sucked. Long before Thursday were specialists at making a cerebral fusion of post-hardcore ferocity and post-punk artistry, they were just some guys in their late teens who wanted to play some shows in their hometown of New Brunswick, NJ. Even in their young, untested state, they were able to share shows with notable names such as Lifetime and the Bouncing Souls because Thursday vocalist Geoff Rickly hosted shows in his basement and snuck his band onto bills. On Dec. 31, 1998, Thursday played their second concert in Rickly’s basement alongside Poison the Well, Saves the Day, Inside and a handful of other bands.

At this point, the band was incredibly inexperienced—so much so that Keeley had never seen a foot pedal before that show and had trouble understanding how to switch between clean and dirty tones on his guitar. “I think we played ‘Wind Up’ and it was awful,” he recalls, speaking by phone from his home in Wilmington, N.C. Keeley played gear borrowed from an Inside member, and even though he was unable to change the guitar tone from what its previous player had set, he still decided to go through with the song. “We wanted it to be heavy like Boy Sets Fire, and instead it was all jangly and clean like Fleet Foxes or something, minus the awesome Fleet Foxes song.”

After the lousy performance, Keeley figured he had totally blown it. He and Rickly (and perhaps other members blurred out by time) glumly shared a bottle of amaretto in Rickly’s stairwell, “our tails completely tucked between our legs.” Still, early missteps such as those couldn’t derail the group. “One of the great things about playing basement punk is that there are plenty of bands that don’t sound good. What mattered was that you had something to say and that you were just participating,” Keeley says. “As long as you meant it, that was the only requirement for participating in the New Brunswick music scene.” (Experiencing that adrenaline rush after having his ideas materialize into actual music didn’t hurt Keeley’s motivations either.)

Thursday have since built their career on championing that same kind of earnestness. The band has written many a tumultuous, violent song, nakedly examining uneasy subjects—automobile accidents, the deaths of Matthew Shepard and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, dead soldiers leaving families and friends behind, the world ruined by Armageddon, Native Americans being uprooted from their land—while only rarely coming across as pointedly out to make a statement. Even though they have frequently espoused the idealistic upsides of DIY culture in interviews, their music is more into rawness than romanticization. They’ve made considerable sonic developments over their discography, too: Compare the rawness of 2001’s Full Collapse, Thursday’s second and landmark record, to the atmospheric quality of 2011’s No Devolución to find two very different documents by the same group.

But the band, which rose as screamo and emo were just beginning to burrow into the public conscious, hasn’t always been rewarded for their hard work. They’ve long been tied to those genres because their material contains definite traces of those styles—screamed vocals, dramatic songwriting, a taste for dark subject matter—even as they’ve matured past those stylistic blueprints. They’ve subsequently been damned by their associations; frequent Warped Tour appearances and tours with other acts tied to emo and screamo have done them no favors. Keeley touches on the positives of being linked to screamo and emo (they allowed the group a foothold within their subculture and perhaps allowed them to reach new crowds) but ultimately finds them off-putting. “Unfortunately, there are lots of people who I think would get something out of listening to our music who just don’t listen to quote, unquote ‘emo’ or ‘screamo,’” he says. “I don’t mean to sound boastful, but I think that what we’ve been doing and what we’ve been trying to do is a lot more interesting and challenging than what I consider emo and screamo to be.”

On November 22, the six-piece publicly announced that they’d be coming to an end in a statement titled “Thank You.” (The Philadelphia date is their final American show.) The letter made it clear that they won’t be touring or recording together as we know them anymore, but it did tease a few future possibilities: Thursday could be transformed into a non-profit, a sporadic recording project, or a collection of other projects. Keeley hesitates to characterize the chane as a breakup or indefinite hiatus in certain terms, but he does reveak that the band had to be stopped because of financial troubles, which is something that Rickly has elaborated on in the past. “Unfortunately, it’s not a recession-proof job to be in a band. Since we’ve been in a recession for a while, it’s been really hard to build any kind of savings,” Keeley says. “We make less than teachers do doing music. We all live as frugally as possible and the truth of the matter is that it’s a struggle every month to figure out where the money is going to come from.”

Understandably, his feelings on this change oscillate between the sadness of breaking up and the satisfaction of closure. Keeley won’t leave music for good—he’s got his band Black Jets and “this weird Portishead-meets-Chet Baker thing” he and Rickly are collaborating on—but he sounds a bit bittersweet when acknowledging that Thursday is “probably the most important band I’ll ever be a part of.”

While Thursday’s current swan song isn’t so much a full stop as it is a question mark, Keeley is wary of the problems getting back together later on or doing it as a hobby can pose. “We’ve all, from day one, been all or nothing about [the band]. It was 100 percent of all of our energy by the last decade. To kind of do it in a diminished capacity would just seem like less,” he says. “We’re all in our early thirties now. Ten years from now, it might be completely inappropriate for a bunch of middle-aged suburban guys to be playing these songs. Some of this kind of music works because it’s a youthful thing. The idea of being an older, cartoonish version of our former self is not really the most desirable look in my mind, you know?”

Thursday performs Fri., Dec. 30, 6pm. $20. With MewithoutYou, Screaming Females, Make Do And Mend, and Aficionado. TLA, 334 South St. tlaphilly.com