Thoughtcrimes: Making Chaos Work
“This is what I do. I’m too far in to do anything else, so I’m just gonna stick with this,” muses Billy Rymer of THOUGHTCRIMES. We’re tiptoeing towards the end of our conversation and we’ve just hit him with a decent dose of existentialism by asking him to reflect on his near two decades in the music industry. Admittedly, we’ve jumped ahead a bit here, but this is where Rymer seems to place in a nutshell something which has been abundantly clear throughout the entirety of our Zoom call: this is a man who was made to do this.
Rymer joins us in his element, dialling in from a studio where he’s hard at work with punk-rappers HO99O9 just days ahead of a hotly-anticipated appearance at Reading & Leeds Festival. Of course, he’s no stranger to those hallowed grounds, having previously appeared there with the band he is surely best known for working with in THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN, but we do have to stop ourselves running off on too much of a tangent as we aren’t here to talk about DILLINGER, HO99O9, or indeed many of the other phenomenal bands with whom Rymer has made his name as one of the most respected drummers in our scene. We’re here to talk about THOUGHTCRIMES.
Founded by Rymer and a host of old friends back in 2019, the band have finally released their debut full-length Altered Pasts – a record they had pretty much finished before COVID-19 even started shutting the world down. Long overdue though it may be, particularly given how quickly they managed to fire out their debut EP Tap Night, it certainly manages to make up for lost time. A scorching and often impressively experimental chaotic hardcore record, its caustic savagery and bleak themes feel somewhat at odds with a process that Rymer describes as “just me hanging out with my friends making music. This is just like an extracurricular activity. I look at it as the same thing as going bowling with your friends or something.”
As casual – joyful even – as he makes it sound, there is definitely still a lot of anger in the music THOUGHTCRIMES make. A lot of it comes from Rymer himself, who in this project plays a far more hands-on role as songwriter and guitarist, while also handling synths, programming and drums, of course. When we ask him where the urgency and fury we hear on the record comes from, he explains. “It just depends on the day. It depends on how you feel. It’s very emotionally driven, and I feel like a lot of extreme emotions can dictate how I approach the writing process. I find when I’m in a happier mood I can actually write angrier music, because it’s more fun. If I’m really frustrated or angry I’m not as productive – that’s just gonna get in the way of progress.”
Of course, it’s not all Rymer either. He’s very quick to emphasise that THOUGHTCRIMES wouldn’t work without a central component of collaboration, of opening himself and his ideas up to the loving scrutiny of his bandmates. “I can only bring it to a certain point. And where I have my limits is where my collaborators can elevate and complete arrangements and songs. For instance, with Brian [Sullivan, guitar] and I, he will always have a lead melody that just makes everything cohesive – something I would never think of… It’s the same thing with Rick [Pepa, vocals], and Russ [Savaresa, guitar], who wrote two songs completely on guitar.”
“It’s not like I wanted this to be a solo venture,” he continues. “I want it to be collaborative. I prefer it that way. And even now there’s new material where Cody [Hosza, bass] is the songwriter and I’m just fortunate because my best friends are all musical geniuses in their own right. That’s what this band is. It’s personal. Everyone here is really close, it’s like this inner circle of friendship where you feel safe, you can be vulnerable. You can get out of your lane and know that you’re okay.”
Equally important however is knowing when to walk away from an idea. Rymer details “gigs” of random parts littered through Dropbox folders that may never see the light of day. “It’s just a matter of if it no longer inspires you and if it no longer serves a song and if the context is not making sense,” he offers. “The easy part is making chaos and just going fast and doing accents and blastbeats. That’s fine. But those parts don’t matter if you don’t have the anchor or a hook or a melody or something to latch onto and to have that contrast.”
It’s all part and parcel of a refining process that – at least in Altered Pasts’ case – has produced some solid gold. Whether it’s a DILLINGER-esque neck-wrecker, something more ethereal and melodic, or the quiet sparsity of a track like Hai Un Accendino, Rymer and co. have on their hands a collection of songs that should see them ease further and further into a niche of their own – and long may it continue. “I just want to keep doing it,” he concludes. “I don’t expect an overnight success, but I’d like to see the band grow. I just enjoy making music with my friends and there’s nothing like being in the studio where you’re feeding off of your collaborators.”
Altered Pasts is out now via Pure Noise Records.
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