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“I can appreciate music, but I feel like what I do is pretty far outside music,” Geoff Rickly tells me. It’s a weekday in late spring, and we’re talking about quantum mechanics in a poorly lit green room at New Jersey’s SST Studios. For 25 years, Thursday have been rehearsing in this space. In the other room, I can hear the band tuning their instruments, ambling into a stripped-back version of “Paris in Flames.”
We’ve been in this beige room all morning. The conversation has been expansive and sprawling, but also compact and contained. Rickly is one of my favorite people to talk to — not only because we share addictive personalities, as well as the strange minds and dark pasts that come along with them, but because of the way he has used his. Across writings, various musical projects, and the impact he’s had on artists of varied mediums, Rickly has produced a truly profound body of work. It is one I’ve felt bound to for nearly 20 years, as an inspiration, a release, and a form of salvation. I was just a kid when I first heard “Understanding in a Car Crash.” It felt like a shock to my hypersensitive system, as someone who had been writing weird, macabre poetry that had been leaving teachers “deeply concerned.” As I entered young adulthood and lost myself completely, Thursday continued to be the perfect soundtrack for my sulking, with its imperfect, lilted cadence and harrowing lyricism. But it wasn’t until I was forced into finding grace and growing up, after hitting rock bottom, that it transcended being simply the sonic justification for my struggles. On the other side, in my Humpty Dumpty era, I’ve found my experience with Thursday and Rickly’s writing has only continued to expand, and my love of the discography deepens with an inherently evolving perspective. After speaking with the artist himself, I realize we are both doing what we have to, to survive: reconciling with our past, and pursuing the present with curiosity and passion.
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Lately, Rickly has been curious about quantum mechanics. Obsessively so. On a trip with his family last year to Switzerland, he visited CERN and saw the particle accelerator. Since, it’s become his focus, alongside music. Unsurprisingly, when I ask him what he sees as its connection to music, he eagerly digs in, “It’s funny. There’s actually a book about it, The Jazz of Physics. It’s about how Ornette Coleman had figured out instead a circle of fifths, to make this harmonic circle of how things relate to each other for improving, so that you’ll always know where the next place to go is depending on what anybody else is playing. He made this circle, and a quantum physicist saw it and was like, ‘This is actually a quantum relationship, and here’s how it relates to physics.’ So there is a pretty huge throughline to music, but I’m also not a very gifted musician… I watch my guys do music, and I’m thrilled.
“I always thought of myself more as a writer with a microphone,” Rickly remarks. “When I say I wrote a bunch of Thursday’s songs, I came up with an overall idea, and the band made it something beautiful. If you heard me play it, you’d say, ‘Don’t do that. You’re not in a key — you’re between keys!’ But I do think that as somebody outside of music, I would come up with surprising ideas that shouldn’t work.” Rickly and I both pause for a beat, listening to the band in the distance — I hear Wade MacNeil’s laugh over amp fuzz — and he continues, “I was talking to Norman about the chorus of ‘Cross Out the Eyes,’ where basically, instead of thinking of the vocal, and writing something that could lay underneath, I said, ’we’ll just follow the vocal!’ Which is a strange thing to do, and makes it kind of iconic — but it’s only because I couldn’t do two things at once. Sometimes the limitations actually make the thing better.”
For better or worse, limitations have been a throughline for Thursday. Their storied arc is one fraught with industry interference, pained interpersonal rifts, individualized cycles of self-destruction, scam artists… However, as Rickly states, seeming blockers can be a beautiful thing, especially in the creative realm. “It’s about having good limitations,” he tells me. “The reason why I don’t think AI art is good is because the limitations are not human limitations. And those limitations, the spots where we put a little bit of our spirit into the music — the little bit of spirit that comes through not being able to do something you want to be able to do — are how you get these evolutionary jumps.”
This brings us back to jazz’s unlikely armchair physicist Ornette Coleman. When Coleman developed “Harmolodics,” his goal was to shatter the constraints of the chord-scale relationships that had defined bebop. In his new system, melodies could be played at any octave, pitch, or tempo the musician wanted, introducing the element of unpredictability. By removing conventional harmonic structure, he freed himself and the ensemble to listen mindfully and react intuitively to the physics of the sound, rather than following predetermined progressions. Like in quantum mechanics, his work claimed randomness as a fundamental property, and capitalized on unpredictability, conceptually and concretely. Coleman was a rebel at his core — tossing aside the tried-and-true Western scale for notes that fell “in between” keys, or “microtones.” For the legendary saxophonist, a note change was based on the emotional context and harmony of the song over anything else, which gave way to a sound that, though to the layman could initially be confused with poor tuning, is an innately natural, fluid extension of the human voice through instrumentation.
Despite failing both math and science in school, it’s not difficult for me to connect Rickly’s work and “that little bit of spirit” to The Jazz of Physics and Ornette Coleman. Having mastered intellectualized musicianship and its rules, to then discard them — in this case — reaps the same unique results as having never learned the rules, relying on creativity, instinct, and one’s own imperfections. For both, art is about accepting one’s own humanity and trusting gut intuition, following feelings. Unpredictability and randomness define quantum mechanics as much as free jazz and post-hardcore. Consequently, not unlike Coleman’s work, “[Thursday] is sort of its own animal,” Rickly says. “That’s why the people that love it love it so much. And that’s why the people that don’t get it are like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
It was at a basement show in New Jersey, long before he became enamored by physics, when Rickly realized emotion and music could be so entwined. Having been a self-described lonely child, DIY shows “changed who I was as a person on a fundamental level.” He looks back, “My first experience was seeing this band, You and I, from New Brunswick. They were this amazing, emotional band with three vocalists and three people who wrote the songs. In terms of heaviness, they were like Converge, but in terms of their approach to writing songs, they were like Fugazi. You had these different personalities that would step to the front and tell a different kind of story. The lyrics were so personal, it felt like an open book. I remember people in the crowd at different times would come and take the microphone and tell a story about the song that they had just heard… and I was just like, ‘Audience participation? What is this?’ …I remember my college roommate was a Youth Crew kid and said, ‘Oh man, stick a tap in these guys.’ So many tears.” But I was like, ‘No, this awakens something in my mind about being vulnerable with other people around — and being embraced for it, instead of outcast from it.’ And then I dove in, really quickly.”
It’s hard to say if community is the glue that holds DIY music together, or if DIY itself is the glue that holds together a community. Either way, the notion of music and writing as a love language is one Rickly has lived by since that first basement show. He’s also found that balance plays a big role: as painfully candid as Thursday songs are, Rickly’s narratives “leave room to dream,” as David Lynch famously said. “I always feel comfortable talking about what the songs are about, because there are clearly so many layers of other things happening that you can’t pin it down in a way that pushes you out of the song,” he says. “And that’s why when people say to me, ‘This song must be so personal for you, Geoff,’ I think to myself, ‘It’s personal for everybody.’ It’s just personal in different ways, and means different things to different people. And the relationship between the people and the band is reflected in different times of turbulence and togetherness, too.”
More concretely, “When we wrote Full Collapse, I was still in school, and I was working on my thesis, which was about the narrative ‘I’ and what ‘I’ means… I was very postmodern — we’ve got to get rid of ‘I’ as a concept. We’ve got to come to collective storytelling. That’s what ‘Cross Out the Eyes’ was about.” He explains, “There’s this great scene in Jane Eyre where she does a portrait, and she rubs out the eyes. So I thought, ‘That’s a great metaphor for getting rid of ‘I’.’ And DIY was a perfect vehicle to do that in, because it’s a collective notion.”
He continues, “We’re a community. It’s not about being alone in your bedroom listening to music like I did when I was a lonely little kid. It was about being together. And even to me, incorporating backup vocals, all the songs were jammed with vocals because I didn’t want one point of view. I wanted a lot of people talking to each other. And that’s why, also, the lyrics quote other songs and then bend them and turn them and ask questions of them. I wanted all the music to be in dialogue with each other. That’s one of the ways in which there’s a preoccupation that follows through all the records.”
2026 has been a prime opportunity to wrestle with turbulence, and reach for togetherness. While the world was on fire, 24 hours after Rickly and I sat down in SST’s windowless green room, Thursday would take to the road for their Full City Devolución tour and give fans a reason to celebrate — with each night honoring three pivotal anniversaries: 25 years of Full Collapse, 20 years of A City by the Light Divided, and 15 years of No Devolución. According to Rickly, there’s a special connection between the triad of celebrants. We dig in.
“Full Collapse and No Devolución are the most connected to me, because they’re at either end of our catalog. Full Collapse is the most raw, first concept of Thursday, which had the biggest impact. And No Devolución is at the other end, when we had tried a million different experiments and really messed with what we were doing. We had finally arrived at a place of, ‘This is the other end of the spectrum from that innocence.’ We know what we’re doing, and there’s stuff that we had been really trying to make work through the other records that always felt like, ‘Well, that’s a cool record, but did we get all the way where we were trying to get to?’ We finally got there with No Devolución. They also came out 10 years apart to the week. They feel like bookends to me.”
As for the two releases that fell in between, he explains, “[2003’s] War All the Time feels totally outside that arc. It’s very different, claustrophobic — it’s the band that we became after we had been touring for a year-and-a-half on Full Collapse. A fierce, heavy, intense band that lies a little bit outside of these other three records, which are lonely and sad but hopeful, a mix of melancholy stuff. And [2009’s] Common Existence is also outside, but in a totally different way.”
The spectrum Rickly refers to, from Full Collapse and No Devolución, measures their shifting sound as much as it does the passage of time. Full Collapse was, and is, the definitive Thursday project. What’s more, it’s been definitive of the entire post-hardcore genre — equal parts hardcore grit, guttural screams, and lilting melodies that carry profound, harrowingly tender lyricism. With it, Thursday sent shockwaves through the scene, and in its wake, it has influenced decades of artists. But impact can be a double-edged sword. When A City by the Light Divided arrived, with its polished production and thoughtfully layered guitars — a divergence echoed and expanded upon later by the shoegazey, atmospheric No Devolución — for some listeners, the band’s ambition was jarring.
But Thursday aren’t alone in grappling with expectations — met and unmet — especially coming from the DIY world. “At the time, I think people thought we were changing too much. But looking back at the body of work, it’s pretty steady.” He unravels their sonic journey, with confidence, “It just kept getting more expansive, more collaborative. A lot of the things that changed were process, but as far as the subject matter and the deepening of one line of thought, it was pretty much in one direction… I remember the fans wanted us to stay Full Collapse forever, and the labels wanted us to become some superstar version of the band. But we were always just such a weird band, and I had so many preoccupations as a writer. I also have a strange voice, and the band has such amazing chemistry that they can focus more on the way a part would feel than the structure of a song. All those things prevented us from becoming superstars.”
He stops for a moment, before saying, “But they’ve also made it that when you look back at Thursday, it means something to people, because it’s so outside of what everybody else was doing. And to me, that’s all I’ve ever wanted. My favorite artist, who I wanted to think like growing up, was PJ Harvey. I aspire to be like her. And that’s not about finding that one moment where you have a super mega hit, or you step into the mainstream and you never look back. It’s about asking yourself, ‘What do I care about, and what am I building?’ …It’s a difficult thing because you want the art to be loved, but you don’t want to have to be famous, either. At least for me, for the type of person that I am, I don’t want to have to be famous.”
I ask Rickly which album feels the most personal to him. We arrive back at his so-called bookends. “Probably Full Collapse. I had a very strange childhood, where I lost a ton of friends by the time I was in high school. We had these train tracks behind our high school, and people got hit by them all the time, and then there was this group suicide in the next town over for me. There’s been books written about it. It really affected me in such a deep way, which I can only say that looking back. It was a record about all those things that happened, one right after the other. It got to the point where I remember, junior year in high school, I’d go to class, and I’d be so sad I’d fall asleep on the desk, and the teacher would just be like, ‘He’s fine. Just let him sleep.’ It was rough on everybody. But it was a very freeing record. I was like, ‘Wow, I’m going to talk about all this stuff now.’ And that really altered who I was as a person. It really let me become somebody who expressed myself in a personal way. So that one will always be my most personal — because it was the moment that I let myself do that.”
In the background, we can hear the band playing through the chorus of “Turnpike Divides,” and Rickly nods in the direction of the practice room. “Whereas No Devolutión, it’s got some of the most personal things that I’ve ever written about on it — but by then I was used to opening myself up. For example, on this song they’re playing, there’s a long buildup at the end of the song, which I think is my favorite, and most personal moment I’ve ever written, at the end of a whole record about this sad divorce, a breakup from somebody that I still loved very much while we were going through it…”
He recalls how the song was originally meant to be two, but the band had found a way to bridge them together. “Now it’s just such a special song to me. Lyrically, I think we had somebody at our record label that always used to say, ‘You’re like Bruce [Springsteen]. You write like Bruce.’ And I’d be like, ‘I’m from New Jersey, so I hate Bruce. It’s cop music!’ And he would go, ‘It’s such a shame. You’re just the wrong generation. You don’t get it.’ But he smartly left me a lyric book, and said, ‘Don’t listen to the music. Just read his lyrics.’ So, I started reading the lyrics — and I was floored. It was the literal opposite of what I thought he was all about. It was so vulnerable and beautiful and sensitive. I love Bruce now. He’s just so misunderstood. ‘Turnpike Divides,’ to me, was my version of Bruce. It’s hard to sleep when you’re born to run. It was like a little bit of a nod to him.”
There’s a theme here, of unlikely connections. The Boss, Geoff Rickly, even Ornette Coleman. All fought constraints, of some sort, and all let that fight fuel them, artistically. “I always thought Bruce was like Mr. New Jersey. But every song’s about, ‘I gotta get the fuck out of New Jersey. New Jersey’s going to kill me.’” Rickly laughs, “That’s when I was like, ‘OK, I get you, Bruce. You’re good.’”
Interview / Editor in Chief: Anna Zanes
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Content Editor: Neville Hardman
Photography: Shervin Lainez
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Poster/zine photos: Mitchell Wojcik
