The Thermals
We Disappear
SADDLE CREEK
6/10
Next year, The Thermals will celebrate fifteen years of fuzzy, hook-laden noise (and angst). Despite some variants in production quality from album to album, the trio has remained fairly consistent when it comes to delivering crunchy punk rock anthems. Guitarist/vocalist Hutch Harris’s wonderfully nasal tone and the band’s pessimistic Portland attitude models a perfect outlet for frantic frustrations and life’s bigger questions.
We Disappear, The Thermals’ seventh studio album, isn’t too surprising in that respect. The record has the right amount of that abrasive aesthetic, lyrical morbidity, and sugarcoated bite. Produced by former Death Cab for Cutie guitarist (and past Thermals collaborator) Chris Walla, We Disappear contains hard-hitting (but poetic) musical manifestos about love, death, regret, and technology. For example, “Into the Code” and “The Great Dying” delve into everyone’s futile attempt toward digital immortality via the power of the Internet. In the simplest terms, amid the newly explored intimate concepts, the band packs another punch with a garage rock record that’s not drastically different from their earlier albums—though in the best of ways.
