Thursday's highly influential sophomore album, Full Collapse turned 15 this year. We have commentary on the album from vocalist, Geoff Rickly. Enjoy the read and let us know your thoughts on Full Collapse fifteen years later.

How did you feel when the album came out?



Tony Brummel, owner of our new label, had told us that the album was very disappointing. That he had hoped we would step it up from Waiting and that there were "no singles" on the record and that opening with a side like Understanding in a Car Crash was a big mistake. The week it came out, it sold 700 copies, a huge let down by Victory Records standards. Everything about the record release was a giant anticlimax. So when we played a small record release at Wetlands in NYC, it was a shock to see every person in the building singing every song. It turned out that they all downloaded it off Napster, which I had never heard of until that night.

Where do you think the album fits in the band's legacy?



Full Collapse is the defining record in Thursday's life as a band. It was the moment we figured out exactly what we wanted to be as a band and it helped me heal from a lot of the young trauma in my life. After it caught on, nearly a year after it's release, it redefined the genre and every band had a "sounds like Thursday" sticker on their CD cover. Every record that followed was a response to Full Collapse.

How the band approach writing?



For Full Collapse, we would generally break off in little songwriting teams with a person that brought a cool part and another person would help them to take the cool part and shape it into a song structure. For example, Tom had the main pull-off guitar part for Understanding in a Car Crash and I cut his four chord progression underneath it down to a two chord and sped the whole thing way way way up (it was a ballad), then wrote the verses and chorus ideas. At which point the team then present the idea to the band and the chemistry takes over: parts start to live and breath, Tim would make major melodic changes to the songs with his bass choices and grasp on theory. When a song felt finished, I would start on the lyrics.

What inspired the lyrics?



At the time, I was consuming a lot of art in an effort to understand the trauma i had been through a couple years earlier. There were accidents, suicides, instances of pointless violence... And art seemed to be the only way that i could begin to make sense of the world. Philosophy was too dry but when artists would sneak philosophy into their work, it would make sense to me. At the time, I was doing a lot of exploration into the ideas of sampling, referencing and recontextualizing other people's ideas, so Full Collapse became my honors thesis for school. There are lots of examples of postmodern repurposing on Full Collapse. I wish I had properly cited every reference but the album was always meant to go with an academic paper. When Victory asked us to virtually eliminate the booklet, that paper got lost and people began to accuse me of plagiarism. It was unfortunate...

What were your hopes and expectations for Full Collapse during the writing and recording process?



We wanted to make something that would allow us to tour for a year and then we were going to "come home and go back to real life"... While we were making the record, our producer was like, this is way too special, you are in this for life now, mark my words.



When you were in the studio, how was the morale of the band?



We were having a blast. I think we had a little less than 20 days so we couldn't second guess anything, unlike War All the Time which took more than 8 months. This is how a $10,000 record can turn out better than a $500,000 record (those were the respective budgets of the two records).