This week our featured artist needs no introduction. Since the early aughts the heavy music collective Thou has been one of the most prolific and consistent bands around. Factoring in demos, EPs, splits and compilations in addition to their full length studio albums they have precisely hella releases to their name.
I had the privilege of speaking with vocalist Bryan Funck in an expansive dual text interview and video conversation. We spoke about comics, zines, video games, authoritarianism, anarchy, what gives life meaning and purpose; and also music. There’s a lot to dig into so without further fanfare, let’s get right into it.
[For an even more in depth look into Thou’s extensive back catalog at the end of this feature I’ll link to a couple of articles that were invaluable to me while researching and preparing for this interview as well as a bonus mixtape from Bryan.]
When we sat down for our video interview in June, the ICE raids loomed large over California and LA. Several members of Thou have at one time called the Golden State home and the issue was also local to me and very much at the forefront of my mind. The Marines had been deployed in the state in what to me seemed like a unique escalation. Bryan, who has a few years on me, saw this as nothing more than another in a long line of government applications of state sanctioned violence. Business as usual more or less.
Adam: Thou, while not the most overtly political band, definitely has strong activist undertones and are not afraid to approach subjects of morality and heavy lyrical themes. An argument could certainly be made that all art is inherently political. As a heavy metal band how does Thou find ways to express their beliefs whether subtle or overtly? And why is it important for artists to do so?
Bryan Funck: I think we do it in the same way that all bands, heavy or not, do: through the art. We have a huge amount of real estate to work with–lyrics, record layouts, merchandise, social media, live shows. I put in the ideas we care about wherever I find the appropriate space. I don’t really understand artists who don’t use their medium to interject things they care about, feelings they’re grappling with, etc. Why else create art? That being said, we do not really have much interest in imperative morality or proselytizing. If anything, Thou is a contemporaneous window into our ever-changing and evolving beliefs. In other words, the human condition.
A: With everything happening in LA with the ICE protests the way the government brought in the National Guard and now the Marines, just overall this slide into authoritarianism or fascism or whatever you want to call it. I just wanted to get your thoughts on this current moment, the way that norms are being broken.
B: Uh yeah, I don’t know if it’s that much different than anything else or any other norms that have been broken over the years. It’s just par for the course for me.
A: Do you feel like that’s kind of embedded into our society?
B: I mean sure, you just look at the civil rights movement or the LA riots or Black Lives Matter during Covid Lockdown. I mean I don’t think that people should take their eye off the prize or not be worried or scared. But I don’t see much difference in terms of how this government hands things versus how governments have historically handled things. Other than the fact that things are escalating a bit and the current regime is sort of excessively unruly. It’s definitely scarier but the tactics and the things they do are no different than even the Democrats.
A: Yeah that is something that is really big. Like everybody gets mad about the deportations and like the way that they’re doing it is one thing but you look at Biden he deported millions of people. Like they were still doing it he wasn’t maybe getting on TV saying I’m going to deport 3000 people a day. But they were still doing it. That was still embedded into how we handle things. So it’s maybe a difference in terms of type and not kind? Maybe it’s just something that is embedded?
B: Yeah I mean, there’s a lot of peacocking with this administration.
A: One thing that does scare me is someone that’s equally authoritarian or aggressive or whatever else but less incompetent. Like if someone else comes into power using the same playbook but they’ve got a better group of people working with them.
B: Yeah, absolutely. But also like I don’t know, it’s hard to say if that would happen. Because you know like I don’t want to get off on a tangent on all this fucking Trump shit.
But you know I feel like part of the reason why he has this populist persona or at least perceived populist persona is because he’s some TV douche that people just recognize like regular poor people recognize him from TV as a celebrity. You would have to find the confluence of a sort of dumbass celebrity that is also savvy enough to pull things off or listen to people. But then again you look at Reagan, I mean he did all kinds of crazy shit and he was just a movie star too so I don’t know. Nothing’s outside the realm of possibility.
But you know the thing about all the Trump stuff that keeps me a bit hopeful about the world is that I really do think that it takes this kind of crisis to galvanize people on the other side to become more active and more engaged with politics, the world, and society. Now whether people do that in the right way or a good way to change things, who knows?
A: Yeah it is kind of both ways and it’s similar with music, right? So it’s easier than ever to get involved politically to join a Facebook group or a local group or with social media. And you feel like you’re doing something and you feel like you’re involved. But are you making a difference? Are you actually involved with the community? And similarly with music where recording, getting access, getting your music out there, it’s easier than ever so it kind of floods the market. It kind of goes both ways.
A: Thou’s latest album Umbilical is one their best. How do they maintain consistency and high standards over the years especially given their diverse catalog?
B: Thank you for the kind words. [Guitarists] Andy and Matthew just have a higher threshold for what they’ll bring to the band, in terms of their personal quality control. The main thing for us has always been trying not to repeat ourselves too much, and trying to improve on whatever the newest material is. We’ve always had a sort of ‘the newest thing has to be the best thing we’ve ever done’ mentality–which, we’re maybe getting away from. But we definitely have a ‘don’t ever release anything that sucks’ standard. I hope!
A: What was the writing and recording process for Umbilical like?
B: Mostly, Andy would send us demos or bring some fully-formed songs to practice or some rough ideas or a few riffs that worked together, and we’d mangle those into something, rearrange, etc. It was a lot of minor tweaking, changing things, changing them back. For Umbilical, we also did a lot of demos–mainly because Tyler was living in Nashville, and we were writing NORCO and Myopia at the same time. So, just for the sake of being able to remember the songs, we needed to record rough versions. That helped some with the finessing. Matthew and [bassist] Mitch both wrote songs on the record, and I brought in a couple of ideas from another record I was working on. Basically, folks would write on their own, Tyler would come down for a week or a few days, and we’d marathon the writing sessions. Not too different from how we’ve written over the years, just condensed into chunks.
Recording was more or less the same as always. We went into the Hightower Studio and banged it out in a week. The only big difference was landing on the sound we wanted for the record, how we wanted to James Whitten to mix it. We also had a kind of wacky setup, so Andy and Matthew could track in the room with their amps, so we could get more natural playing and in-room feedback.
A: Grunge and sludge are a clear foundational north star for Thou across their discography. Culminating in the covers compilation record Blessings of the Highest Order. What is it about grunge/sludge generally and Nirvana specifically that Thou is so drawn to and influenced by?
B: We were teenagers in the 90s, so grunge is coded on our lizard brains. The social politics, the punk attitude, the melancholic nature of the music–what’s not to love? I’m not sure ‘sludge’ has had a huge impact on our band or music, outside our love for Eyehategod and Crowbar.
A: We touched on Nirvana in our written correspondence and I definitely wanted to talk more about Nirvana. In grade school, for me this would have been like 1998, when I first started getting into Nirvana, Cobain was dead and the band was no longer active. But they were hugely impactful for me and obviously they were impactful for you all. Whether informing Thou and your music, influencing you there, or just you in your youth or whatever the case. And then I look at now, this resurgence of shoegaze and grunge and young people very young people hugely into Nirvana. What do you think it is? Do you think it’s something about Cobain as this anti-hero mythic figure? Something about their music that has this lasting legacy that all different people are coming back to?
B: It’s the confluence of all these things with Nirvana. I think Kurt Cobain said he wanted to do something that was like the Beatles meets Black Sabbath or whatever. And that’s kind of like exactly right. It’s like pop music but filtered through this really ugly sort of like framework. And then there’s also like social politics in it and even if Nirvana was not super explicit with their politics in terms of like lyrically. I think that the way they presented themselves and the way they interacted with people and the world was inherently socially political. And just sort of the ideas about feminism and being against homophobia which in the 90’s was pretty radical for a mainstream band to be talking about. So I just think all the good ingredients were there to make an awesome thing. And then just the fact that the music is just incredible.
A: Yeah, it helps that it’s just good.
B: Yeah, it’s poppy and catchy but it’s also, um you know…
A: It’s gritty, it’s got that edge.
B: It’s harsh. It’s the same reason why like Turnstile is having a big moment because it’s sort of the same thing. It’s like punk and hardcore people coming and creating pop music that sort of has a more widespread accessibility.
If you follow @thou_band_official on Instagram, which you should, you’ll know that in addition to updates about the band they frequently post reading recommendations. Not the typical fare but a wide ranging selection of zines, comics, books, and more. Bryan and I talked about how he first got into zines and comics and what he finds so captivating about the formats.
A: I’ve seen from your socials that you’re super into comics, zines, and reading.
B: A few of us are yeah.
A: Would you say that you spend a lot of your leisure time reading?
B: Yeah. I mean probably not enough. I fart around on my computer or my phone like anybody else.
A: Because I’ve gotten a few pretty good recommendations just from following you like, hey I’m reading this right now. What is that? I’m gonna check that out. How’d you get into comics, zines, and stuff like that?
B: Comics probably from, you know I’m 45 so I grew up in the 80’s, Saturday morning cartoons was sort of like an entryway and then the toys. I think I probably had the DC Super Powers toys and Marvel Secret Wars toys before I’d even read any comics. And then I want to say I picked up MAD and Cracked magazine and maybe like Elvira. My grandma was really into late night horror B-movies that they would show back in the day with like Gilbert Gottfried and Rita Radford and Elvira. So that got me into the Elvira magazine which is just like basically a comic and then from there it was just like getting stuff off the spinner rack at the Timesaver or 7-Eleven. So that was kind of how I got into comics, that and Garbage Pail Kids or whatever.
Zines you know, like you’re pretty close to my age, but I’m of an age where there was no internet, no Spotify, none of that stuff. So in order to find music like specifically punk and hardcore stuff that I kind of stumbled upon and was obsessed with as a teenager you basically had to mail order records. And a part of mail ordering was getting zines and you’d see like oh there was an interview with Earth Crisis in this zine. I gotta get this $2 zine because it has this interview with Earth Crisis or Abnegation or somebody else. So you’d start picking up zines for that and then I think the zine stuff from the music zines was sort of like a gateway into the more personal, esoteric, and political stuff.
A: Did you read like Flipside or any of that kind of stuff?
B: Before I was deep into the punk stuff I was probably grabbing like Alternative Press was like the closest thing to an indie thing or like Punk Planet maybe and I probably had like Kerrang! Because I was deep into the grunge stuff there used to be like these goofy magazines you could get at the grocery store. Essentially just like pinups and posters of all your favorite rock stars. Inside Front was probably the one that in terms of like political zines, you’d get it because they’re doing stuff with Catharsis, Żegota, and His Hero Is Gone and then they sort of got away from being a music zine and then sort of became like whatever Crime Think became. So I think that’s how me and all my friends got into Crime Think was from reading Inside Front and then seeing they put out a book and then they put out a collection of this zine Evasion so then you’re checking that out too. So that’s how you get into all that stuff.
A: Cool. Yeah I’m right on the cusp of that, between analog and digital. Where my childhood was definitely before all the digital stuff, but then as I grew up it got more and more incorporated into daily life. But I do think that something is lost with the physical medium that we don’t have with digital. Which in some ways people are bringing back like vinyl got popular and then there was a shortage of wax and cassettes got popular and now they’re both doing pretty good. Which is cool to see. But like mail order for me that moment had passed, like it still existed but less so. Or less accessible. Just that experience of they sent you your order and then they also sent you something else that brought you into this whole new world and now you’re going to a completely different place. Or like Blockbuster.
B: Like for us, me and my friend group as a teenager you couldn’t preview this stuff ahead of time. There was no checking it out. Very Distribution was like the big distribution center for all the punk and hardcore stuff we jumped right into. We would go through these catalogs. There were these huge catalogs – ‘Sounds like Deadguy‘, ‘Sounds like Earth Crisis.’ And we’d highlight them and then me and my friends would sort of divvy it up. We’d all buy different stuff and then we’d just trade CDs and record stuff for each other. And that’s sort of how we figured out in a wider range how we could get into all this stuff. Then I was there when Napster and all this stuff started. I still use Soulseek. I love Soulseek.
A: Yeah I was there for that whole thing; Limewire, Kazaa, all of that. But yeah like with Blockbuster or the music store there’s something about going in and looking at the racks and picking it up and handling it and it is different than streaming. Streaming pushes it to you. It kind of tries to figure out what you’re listening to and what other people that listen to that listen to and then it tries to push something to you. But it doesn’t really know you.
B: Which you know the thing about that is, people try to hate on it. Like I’m not of the mindset that you throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’ve found great stuff by just letting Spotify or whatever run. I’m for all these ways of discovering things. I think when you just get too into one thing you’re sort of limiting yourself. Which for some people might be good. I just like to live my life and find stuff as I find stuff, which is maybe not the most efficient way. Like I have a record shop and people ask me all the time. But when I listen to stuff I’m not always on the hunt for the newest thing or constantly discovering stuff. Sometimes I just want to listen to a Smiths record for the 10,000th time. But then you find something crazy and new so I don’t know.
A: That’s something I’ve had to force myself to work on this year. Because last year I got burnt out on like, I’m going to listen to everything that’s new. It’s like 10-20 releases every week and that’s just the stuff that I’m looking at that I’m already aware of and pretty sure I’m going to be into or I’m pretty sure it’s going to be good. And it was overwhelming. So this year I forced myself to go back and whether it’s Nirvana or I like this indie band The Mountain Goats. Just listening to the shit that I like.
B: *Laughing* I like how you call The Mountain Goats this ‘indie’ band.
A: Well just in terms of genre, but yeah they’ve gotten a bit bigger. Like he got a band and stuff. But just like focusing on listening to the shit that I like versus always trying to keep up with the new stuff.’
B: Which… for what? Why? It’s like homework. Like what are you even doing? Are you even enjoying it? I went through this with the record shop. With the shop, I’m a very anti-business person the way that I run it. For better or worse. My thing was why turn a thing that you like doing into a pain in the ass? Just keep doing it the way you like doing it. It’s either gonna work or it’s not.’
A: So that’s there in Louisiana, your shop?
B: Yeah, New Orleans.
A: So how does that work? Are you there pretty much full time? Or do you have employees and stuff?
B: I’m there Monday-Friday and then I have a person that covers the weekends for me.
A: Oh damn, so it’s pretty much you. How big is the space?
B: Not big, it’s small. It’s like a little tiny record store. Mostly punk, indie, and underground stuff and then a bit of ‘civilian’ music.
A: How long has that been there?
B: We just made nine years in the spot we’re in now. We were in the foyer of our friend’s club for about two years before that. And then before that I lived in Oakland from like ’05-’06, basically just with [Hurricane] Katrina I moved out there. Then I moved back to New Orleans and started volunteering at the anarchist info shop The Iron Rail. I basically did the records at the shop from ’06 to 2012 when the shop closed. Then there was a couple year gap where all the stuff was just sitting at the shop until another collective member from The Iron Rail opened the record shop in 2014.
A: So about ten years then.
B: Yeah about ten years doing this shop and then six or seven at The Iron Rail. It’s the same as when we were talking about how you discover music as a kid. The other big way for me was going to punk and hardcore shows and there’d be a distro table. And there’d just be somebody there selling a bunch of records and stuff. To me that was just how you did it so at some point I just started doing a distro at shows. So from like the late 90’s to the early 2000’s I’d just have a box of records or a box of CDs most of the time and I’d just be selling stuff. I remember seeing Josh Jubinsky who does Dead Tank Distro, who’s still doing it mostly mail order. But whenever I’d go to Florida in the span of a good like three to four years I would always see this dude at any show I was at. I think we just had the same taste in music so we just ended up at similar shows. But at all these shows I would just see him with a table full of records.
A: Just kept bumping into him.
B: Yeah that was how you discovered cool stuff. But the way they would stock these distros it wasn’t, ‘I’m gonna stock these records because I know these records are gonna sell’. It was like ‘I’m gonna grab these records because I love these records’. Or I’m getting these records because I put out records and I traded records with another DIY label and we trade stuff so now they have my stuff and I have their stuff. So that was sort of the proliferation of DIY, punk, and hardcore stuff.
A: Nice.
B: So yeah it just felt like a more organic and, I hate to use this word, but like ‘curated’ records and stuff.
A: There’s nothing wrong with a little curation…
B: I just think it’s like an overused buzzword that people use. I mean I’m using it because it’s the right word, but there’s some modern connotations. It’s a little TikTok influencer.
A: You said The Iron Rail was an anarchist collective? So what was that like?
B: In the early 2000’s there was a warehouse kind of punk adjacent performance arts space called the ARK. You could do shows there. And in the back there was a bike shop like another anarchist collective DIY bike shop where for like a couple bucks you could get your bike fixed or buy tubes or get a bike for cheap. It was all volunteer run. At some point The Iron Rail opened up in that space basically to pivot off of the shows being there. So when a show was going on, they would open the doors real big and people would see the anarchist space. So you’d have these more like apolitical music people that would then be exposed to the more radical politics and stuff. It was more like a lending library because that neighborhood was right on the cusp of the downtown French Quarter area and there wasn’t really a decent library on that side of town. So it kind of opened up as a not quite free but very cheap library and then they opened a very small book store in the front of it to basically pay for running the library. When I got involved I was more interested in doing the records.
A: The music angle.
B: Yeah, it was just something I had experience with and was interested in. This was probably around ’06, so I’d been putting on shows since ‘98 or ‘99. So like eight or so years. Putting on shows as a DIY promoter, especially in New Orleans, which is sort of like a glorified small town filled with apathetic unsupportive people. That was like a hard path to choose. But the only way that I could make it work even though I don’t think of myself as ‘successful’ at it but the only way I could make it work for me was to be very hands on. I’m calling the shots. You don’t get a lot of help. You more or less do everything yourself. Every once in a while there would be a couple people to help you out with things. Who after a year or two like, I would just burn through people because the work load I was on was insane. It was stupid.
A: So you’re very self motivated and driven then?
B: Yeah. I guess. Yes. But I mean not just for altruistic reasons. I did shows because I wanted the bands I wanted to see to come play and that was the way I could do it. But all that to say I was doing that and then Iron Rail was for me a way that I could be a part of something where I didn’t have to be responsible or the one making all the decisions. I could just show up and be as helpful as possible but I didn’t have to call the shots. It was like a break for me from having too much responsibility or stress. And it was a great exposure to collective consensus decision making and all that stuff. The positives and the negatives of working collaboratively with people.
A: Okay so you’re putting on shows, you’re doing the distro, were you playing in bands at that time as well?
B: Yeah I had bands from like ‘98 or ‘99 until like ‘02 or ‘03. I mean the only other serious band I was in was this kind of screamy hardcore band Dear Diary: I Seem to be Dead before Thou. Basically like two years. That was like the most serious band I’d been in. Then that band broke up. And I was kind of bumming around for about a year and then Katrina happened and I moved to California. I had a band in California, in Oakland with some other New Orleans people. But there were a lot of conflicts with peoples’ schedules and we just couldn’t get it off the ground. Then I moved back in ‘06 and then in ‘07 that’s when I joined Thou. That’s been the main thing since then.
A: Thou’s album titles: Umbilical, Magus, Heathen, Summit, Peasant, Tyrant. These one word, strong, evocative album titles and then, especially on Tyrant for example, you’ve got these long almost sentence length song titles. So what do you feel about brevity in an album’s title? Or like with post-rock because they don’t have words, they’ll have these really long song titles. What’s up with that?
B: I mean they had the title for Tyrant before I joined Thou so I just kind of kept the trend with the second record and then just kept it going for the third, fourth, and fifth records. And then just kind of kept the longer more self-indulgent titles for the EPs and stuff. I would just come up with something ridiculous. Probably from something I was reading or something I had jotted down a hundred years ago or whatever. Rejected song lyrics or something. It was just something we did. We just kept it that way. I have this conversation with people all the time, especially around here because there’s so many good bands with terrible band names. Why would you kneecap yourself like that?
Again I joined this band years after it had already existed so I don’t have a lot of say and I absolve myself of any responsibility, but I don’t think Thou is a particularly good band name. It’s non-offensive and aesthetically like, fine or whatever, but it’s not good. It doesn’t really say anything, but what it does have going for it is its very monolithic where it’s almost like a Rorschach test. It’s ambivalent enough to where somebody can put whatever they want onto it. And I think that it’s in the spirit of that I kept with the full-lengths. Just having a very succinct title that identified the main theme of the record in my mind or was evocative of whatever that theme was I was trying to get at. But it was open enough and spacious enough where people could put whatever they wanted onto it.
But that’s how I write everything for Thou. I’m not a good writer and I’m definitely not a good enough writer to say what I mean. If I’m going to write about some political assertion or even just a feeling about something it’s incredibly difficult for me to just come out and say what I mean or what I feel and it have any artistic value at all. I can’t write like that and have the thing be good like in an artistic sense. So that’s why I lean more into my sort of ambiguous stuff. Without drifting into the sort of gobbledygook word salad grunge stuff. The bands I love all did stuff like that where it was all over the place. And my brain… I’m too OCD. I have to write stuff in an orderly way. But to anybody else it probably doesn’t seem that way; it’s only orderly to me.
A: A lot of that grunge stuff was like puns, jokes, or like a play on words.
B: Yeah, that’s also not my wheelhouse. I wish I could write like Fiona Apple, or Morrissey, especially Smiths era Morrissey, the dude from The Shins; Mirah, the K Records folksy singer-songwriter. If you like Mountain Goats you should check out Mirah for sure. Those first three Mirah records are impeccable. Incredible records, amazing. But their way of sort of stringing together rhymes that is interesting and smart and also the symbolism and metaphors is perfect. That is something I could never even touch. But those writers are some of the ones I love. I wish I could write like that. Purposely ambiguous to hide my lack of talent is more my style.
A: Thou’s catalog is extremely diverse with whole albums delving into certain sonic explorations or thematic concerns. Do they have these concepts planned out in advance for a specific project or have a more organic approach seeing where a jam or riff leads?
B: We don’t really ‘jam,’ although that might change in the future. Usually, someone brings a song or an idea of a song to practice, and we work it out. That’s more or less how we write each song. In terms of albums, we generally have an idea of what the album is going to sound like from the start–or, at least, once we’ve established that we’ve written a song for the album, that usually becomes the touchstone for the rest of the record. Normally, we come up with other songs as we’re working on a record, but those get culled from the album; those songs and whatever we might write between records are generally what end up on the EPs and splits. Really, it was just the EPs leading into Magus that had any planning outside the albums proper. What would an acoustic Thou record sound like? What would a drone record sound like? Whatever it takes to keep us interested!
A: Is the melting away of subgenres underneath the heavy/extreme music moniker beneficial? Why or why not?
B: I never paid attention to that kind of stuff. When I got into hardcore I discovered Minor Threat and Inside Out and immediately jumped to Earth Crisis and metalcore, especially the vegan straight edge stuff. The funny thing is part of why I got deep into hardcore was a response to my friend group at the time getting way more into metal. In terms of like Metallica and Pantera, even the more underground stuff at best was like Carcass and Corrosion of Conformity. But it was like METAL. And for me I wanted something that was more rooted or connected to punk. Music that was lyrically saying something that resonated with me. All that to say there isn’t much distinction sonically between the shit I was listening to and the shit they were listening to. It’s just how you make those small distinctions. But to me it’s either good music or it’s not. I either like it or I don’t.
Sonically something can check all kinds of boxes and have all these things going for it, but I might just not like it for whatever reason it might not resonate or it might not hit me at the right time in my life. That’s a huge thing. There’s this band Gather that’s a Bay Area vegan straight edge band. And my buddy Scott had played the demo for me right before I moved to California. And it ticked all the boxes. Chunky e-chord hardcore record vegan straight edge all this shit I liked. And I was like, eh I don’t know, I already love like 50 bands that sound like this that I’ve been listening to for ten years. So I wasn’t impressed. And then I moved to California and I saw them play a random house show in San Francisco. And they’re talking about veganism and Eva and Dustin are fucking crying like it’s a Rites of Spring show. It’s like this crazy emo thing. And then they cover my favorite Culture song. It was like this perfect confluence of all these things and that’s when this light bulb just goes off. You’re sort of like, oh ok, I get it, I love this. It’s awesome. I don’t know if any of that answers your question about subgenres.
A: Oh yeah, for sure.
B: I mean like what is Thou? People have called us a doom band or a sludge band or whatever. Although we have elements of all sorts of other things like to me we’re just a heavy grunge band or just a punk band. I always tell people we’re just a punk band. I think all that stuff to me ultimately has more to do with attitude and artist output than it does with these small musical distinctions.
A: One of the most unique projects Thou has been involved in was the NORCO soundtrack. It’s a game flanked by dystopian unease and intrigue alike. Why was NORCO something Thou felt compelled to contribute to?
B: A good friend of ours made the game. One of my oldest friends in the world. In terms of the content, it’s very specific to us and growing up here in New Orleans. If we were going to do something like that outside the framework of the normal way you put out music or a record, of course it’s going to be with the dude you know about the thing we love and the game is incredible. So it was kind of a no-brainer. There’s a socio-political undercurrent to it that was interesting to us. We’re lucky he let us be a part of it so thank you to him.
A: Honestly I wasn’t even aware of the game or that you all had done a soundtrack for it so I’m definitely going to have to check it out. It kind of sounds a little bit like Jeff VanderMeer? I don’t know if you’ve read Absolution?
B: Yeah, I haven’t read the newest one but I read the original trilogy [The Southern Reach]. Mitch and Tyler are actually deep into the VanderMeer stuff, I think they’ve read all his stuff.
A: I love that stuff, his stuff is kind of like [Jorge Luis] Borges or whatever. Like he’s not afraid to just go into it.
B: Yeah, it’s sick. NORCO kind of has a little bit of that vibe that kind of not quite Lovecraftian but the weird experimental and organic sort of alien qualities to it. Especially if you like that kind of retro style games you should definitely check it out.
A: You got a favorite dinosaur?
B: A favorite dinosaur?!? T-Rex, come on.
A: T-Rex. Easy answer, okay.
B: Yeah, of course. If you’re into comics at all, Steve Bissette did a really sick dinosaur comic called Tyrant. It never got finished but there’s four issues. And it’s supposed to be a T-Rex like from birth to death but he never finished it. Yeah, it’s insane. You should definitely check it out. It’s very true to science or as much as we know.
A: What is something that gives you hope?
B: My friends. And the fact that you know I’m 45 and a lot of them are a similar age, that even at our age midlife or older that we are continuing to grow, evolve, and expand. That our ideas about the world are still changing. At least amongst the people I surround myself with, people that aren’t stuck in a rigid mentality with how they view the world, communicate, and love each other. That’s a very current thing that has given me a lot of hope for people.
You know I get stuck in these things too, where especially like in the context of a band or a band dynamic or any kind of collaborative project, at a certain point in life or with your immediate people you sort of have to accept them for who and what they are and not expect any meaningful change. But you know, definitely recent events have maybe made me reevaluate that a little bit. That there is maybe some hope that people can grow a bit.
A: Yeah I think that having an ability for change or space for change. Like ultimately people are who they are, you can’t expect someone to radically change but to have an openness. There’s things and thoughts that I’ve had that I thought wouldn’t change and then over the years have evolved. Community and friends especially. That’s really important.
A: What advice would you give to someone that’s just getting into playing music or starting a band?
B: *Laughing* Don’t do it! It’s too hard. Be ambitious. Do whatever you want. Do it the way you want. You don’t have to let… there’s not a right way to do these things. There’s not a right approach and there’s not a magical recipe that makes everything work.
My buddy was at the shop yesterday. He’s in a band and he was asking about putting out a record and if he should talk to labels. And I was like, dude I don’t even know anymore. There’s so many ways to do it. And the thing that worked for my band might not work for your band. There’s other people I know that were super lucky and got all kinds of breaks and their shit sucks. And then there’s people I know that are incredible musicians that are like banging their heads against the wall trying to do stuff and nobody cares. It might not be till 30 or 40 years after or 50 years too late or long after they’re dead before anybody MAYBE even cares.
So you have to just do this stuff because you like doing it. You have to make that the most important thing. You have to make art itself the end goal. And everything else… it might happen, it might not happen. Whatever. That can’t be the motivation for doing the thing.
A: Awesome.
B: Because you’re definitely not going to succeed. You’re gonna fail.
A: Don’t try. You’re gonna fail.
B: *Laughing* That’s right.
A: What’s next for Thou?
B: We have a tour next week in Europe and a tour through the Midwest US in October. Maybe release a few splits and random things we’ve been wrapping up. We’re going to finish out the year then take the first six months of 2026 off, maybe all of next year. After that, if we’re still a band, we’ll probably start writing another record.
Thou is…
Bryan Funck – Vocals
Andy Gibbs – Guitar
Matthew Thudium – Guitar
Mitch Wells – Bass
Tyler Coburn – Drums
Be sure to follow Thou on Instagram and Bandcamp.
For a more in depth dive into Thou’s extensive discography check out:
Treble Zine’s “A Beginner’s Guide to the music of Thou”
Bandcamp Daily’s “Making Sense of Thou’s Messy Metal Discography”
And as promised, enjoy a bonus mix tape via Self-Titled Magazine
