Thumper: Controlling The Chaos
We’re around five minutes into our conversation with THUMPER frontman Oisín Leahy-Furlong when he seems to sum up in a nutshell just what it is his band do: “controlled chaos”. He’s chatting to us just days ahead of the release of the Dublin sextet’s debut full-length, and you won’t find a more succinct description of the record than that. Titled Delusions Of Grandeur, it’s an album that makes full use of the six-piece’s most raucous capabilities while never quite coming apart entirely. It sprawls across a full hour’s runtime, delivering more hooks than you’ll find in a fishing shop in what’s easily one of the most arresting debuts of the year so far.
Like many records nowadays, such a debut has been a long-time coming for THUMPER, with recording starting in what now feels like the before times of 2019. The delay clearly proved fruitful for the band however, allowing them to maximise the full potential of each of their songs by stuffing them with seemingly endless intricacies and stretching many past the six, seven and even eight-minute mark. “It’s always seemed intuitive to us and what we’re interested in doing to extend past the normal song structures,” explains Leahy-Furlong. “The elevator pitch for the band is like it can be pretty heavy, pretty psych-y, but it’s also totally beholden to a pop sensibility and making sure that at all times that balance is always there. so the heavier it gets the more melodic it has to get.”
As indicated, striking that balance often takes a fair bit of time, something Leahy-Furlong admits wasn’t entirely by design but perhaps a more natural result of the band’s myriad influences, which span everything from electronic music to KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD and MY BLOODY VALENTINE. Much like those bands, and especially the latter, THUMPER are particularly fascinated by the idea of breaking through the listener’s attention span. “I can guarantee you that people will listen to this album and they’ll be like ‘oh my God this is fucking terrible!’ but the song will keep going,” laughs Leahy-Furlong. “And then in the middle they’ll be like ‘maybe this is alright’, and towards the end they’re like ‘nah it’s actually awful’, and then by the end they might be like ‘nah it’s actually really good’ – I want the journey, I don’t want the cliff notes!”
That whole idea of journey is borne out not only in the individual songs, but across the album in full as well. In a slight departure from the wildest abandon of their early days, Leahy-Furlong and co. have paid close attention to every detail on Delusions Of Grandeur. “In the really early days we were super fucking chaotic and every single gig ended with shit blowing up and guitars being smashed,” he expands. “It was a lot of fun, but I kind of got a little bit sick of rolling out the circus every night. It was a bit like the music was secondary to the experience, and song-writing is really the most important thing to us. So this shift happened where I wanted to bottle the feeling people get when they see us smashing a guitar, I want to have that feeling but just from listening to the music.”
“That’s probably the biggest shift, but also it started off as a solo project and now it’s a collaborative project,” he adds. “I love collaboration, be it musically or also just performing to an audience is a kind of collaboration as well; that communion where everyone is on the same page basically trying to get the same thing out of an experience is quite intoxicating. So I prefer it the way it is now 100% to the way it started.”
Another change Leahy-Furlong seems to be bracing himself for is the fact that with the release of Delusions Of Grandeur fans might finally be able to understand his lyrics, these no longer buried under the band’s live walls of sound. As we speak, he isn’t entirely sure what such an experience will be like, suggesting: “songs can be emblematic of how you felt in an hour, or in a day or a week. They can be universal in a sense but the more specific you get, you change, you move on from things. Relationships change if it’s a love song, if it’s a hate song those relationships change as well, but some of them are pretty close to the bone and I don’t know what that’s going to be like to go out and have people actually know what the hell I’m talking about.”
Either way, it’s clear Leahy-Furlong isn’t about to let that uncertainty stop him and the band from getting back to what they do best. As we come to wrap up, he emphasises that he’s in it for the long haul, stressing that “all I want to do is this for the rest of my life” before concluding, with a glint in his eye. “The main thing for us now is just to kind of reconnect with the final part of the whole process which is sharing it with people. They say you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, and we’re looking forward to getting it back, rekindling our relationship with people out there – kissing some babies, touching some people on the knee and saying ‘hello, we’re here for you, we’re ready and we hope you are as well’.”
Delusions Of Grandeur is out now via EMMS.
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