Photos by Jesanne Rechsteiner

United Nations: "Serious Business" (via SoundCloud)

“Everything in my life has been fantastic this year,” Geoff Rickly says at the start of our phone call. “I can't believe it!” And while it may be hard for anyone to fathom this brainy, angsty rock singer best known as the frontman for the deadly serious post-hardcore pioneers Thursday in a state of utter bliss, Rickly’s disbelief feels genuine—especially when taking into account his hellish recent past.

First, there was the sudden dissolution of Thursday in 2011. “The whole thing came crashing down in two days and I wasn't even in the country,” he recalls. “When I got home I basically didn’t have a job anymore, or any experience doing anything else.” Soon thereafter, as a 32-year-old college dropout, he’d work retail, break up with his girlfriend, and have a comically futile experience writing a screenplay he describes as a “younger Star Wars spiritual.” And then there was his despondent 2012 solo mixtape Darker Matter, recorded in his apartment during Hurricane Sandy. And the subsequent cross-country tour, where he played house shows and slept on floors. And then last year, he got robbed. At gunpoint.

So Rickly took his problems to the United Nations. The cartoonishly aggressive hardcore guise was familiar to Rickly’s fans, but as more of a rumor, concept, or art project than an actual, functioning band. The singer originally started the group in 2005, after Thursday’s major-label debut War All the Time. “I wanted to write the first UN record as the next Thursday record,” he says now. “I had all this super grindy, blasty stuff and I was just like, ‘Let's completely disconnect from melody and try and get off a major label.’” At the time, he met serious resistance from the rest of Thursday, who sought to go in a more accessible direction—and thankfully, they won out: the resulting Dave Fridmann-produced A City By the Light Divided still stands as that band’s finest hour.

Still, Rickly didn’t give up on the more aggressive music rattling around his head. United Nations released a self-titled album in 2008 and the “Never Mind the Bombings, Here’s Your Six Figures” 7” two years later, but the shadowy band was more known for its legal troubles than its music. The actual United Nations requested that Facebook remove the United Nations band page and sent a cease-and-desist letter. “It has 30 people listed on it because it's anybody who has ever been speculated to be in the band,” Rickly snickers. “I just think about the day-to-day life of a legal clerk at the UN having to listen to Converge and I think, ‘Aw, I wish that could've been avoided.’”

United Nations: "Meanwhile on Main Street" (via SoundCloud)

Rickly and guitarists Jonah Bayer and Lukas Previnare are the only publicly named members of the band, but it also includes members of Converge, Glassjaw, and Pianos Become the Teeth. After numerous lineup changes, United Nations solidified to record their upcoming multimedia boxed set The Next Four Years, headed by the ferocious single “Serious Business”. An incapacitating blast of what Rickly calls “screamo power-violence,” the track has the singer playing off his image for jokes about white privilege and careerism. He says it was inspired by how he “was married and totally blew it by being on the road all the time and not even examining myself at all.”

Weirdly, United Nations doesn’t seem like serious business at all to Rickly, but rather a lark that happens to be attracting attention in the midst of so many other projects. He’s launching a label called Collect Records along with Norm Brannon from emo heroes Texas Is the Reason (Weekend’s Shaun Durkan is also an employee). He’s also the new frontman for the very early 00s alt-sounding No Devotion, a merger with former members of UK rockers Lostprophets (whose ex-lead singer was sentenced to 29 years in prison after pleading guilty to child-abuse charges). “[No Devotion] has a whole international press campaign about to go out, and they're totally livid that UN is getting so much hype right now,” Rickly laughs. “But it's sort of perfect that when you stop caring so much, things just work better.”

Pitchfork: The Next Four Years is the most aggressive music you’ve made—how does that square with being in your mid-30s and “not caring” as much?

Geoff Rickly: We stopped caring about what anybody thinks, but there's still some really shitty things going on. Like, half the band lives in fucking Baltimore—I mean, no drag on Baltimore, but that's not easy. [laughs] Meanwhile, leading up to being mugged last year, I was really sick and in the hospital for half the year, getting treatments for this rare thing that I've had since I was a kid. And I had [temporarily] split up with the girl that I totally love and am living with now. Everything sucked when we started making this record, and it was the only thing I had that was even worth caring about. The commitment in it comes from there.

"What we get in punk these days are layers of 'anti-', and so

many of them are so self-serving. It's not about larger freedom."

Pitchfork: What did you learn about yourself after transitioning from playing big venues in Thursday to giving away your solo album and crashing at houses across the country on tour?

GR: People see musicians on a huge stage playing a festival for 80,000 people and are like, “Oh, they have such magnetism,” but it always embarrasses me more than it makes me feel proud. I'm still totally going out and sleeping on people's floors so I can play a house show and give away music. Of course I would. That's how I started. All that sort of stuff reminds you to stay true to the essence of what art is about.

So when we made [The Next Four Years] a boxed set, it’s supposed to be a critique, because I truly thought: “If our ‘career’ doesn't matter, let's make a piece of art—something that actually says something new and interesting.” My idea is that punk is no longer a subculture or a counterculture in any way. It's totally just a small reflecting mirror for the same things that go on in larger culture. So I had this idea that not only should we be critiquing punk rock, but we should be doing it from the inside—we should self-examine and talk about things like our own white privilege and these phony senses of being an artist.

Pitchfork: What specific parts of punk culture are you critiquing?

GR: It's maybe 10 different layers of hypocrisy: everything from a Minor Threat T-shirt being $28 at Urban Outfitters, to that being a thing where somebody would set up a whole set of ideals to combat the $28 Minor Threat shirt, to the fact that Minor Threat accidentally started straight-edge in the first place. There's so many layers to what's wrong with that. What we get in punk these days is the “anti-anti”: Someone comes up with something, then the next generation is against that, and then the next generation is against that, and then that thing becomes a problem. There's these layers of anti-, and so many of them are just so self-serving. It's not about larger freedom. Laura Jane Grace and Against Me! are one of the only punk rock things I've seen in years. And that's what [The Next Four Years] is about, starting with "Serious Business" as a joke about careerism and privilege and how blind we all are. All these songs are set up as jokes, and the punchlines are actually incredibly sad.

Pitchfork: How have your views on careerism and white privileged been shaped by Thursday’s history in the Warped Tour, which many claim as being an incubator for both of those things?

GR: I got married in Vegas on Warped Tour on July 4—that's how crazy my life has been. Believe me, I know how absurd things can get. I've had years where I've had questionable things going on in my life. I've had a warrant out for my arrest for something stupid like a parking ticket, and a cop has stopped me and been like, "Yeah, you don't seem like trouble." It would be totally absurd for me to deny that that's privileged and also that I haven't fucking exploited it every time that I could because I don't want to go to jail for something fucking stupid like parking tickets.

Pitchfork: What's your reaction to seeing non-rock artists like Majical Cloudz and How to Dress Well recently vouch for Thursday as a formative influence?

GR: I can't tell you how amazing that is. Sunday morning with my lady, we put on Majical Cloudz, we put on How to Dress Well, we put on all the mellow shit. And to have them DM me about how much they loved Thursday back in the day, that's wild, man! Because maybe for the last five years it was super uncool to admit that you ever liked Thursday. So it's good to have a bunch of people be like, "Yeah! That's the shit." And Deafheaven are like little bros to me—[guitarist] Kerry [McCoy] told me one of the first parts he ever learned was "Standing on the Edge of Summer”. I hear it when he's playing and I love it.

"The future of punk rock has nothing to do with guitars. Everything interesting that I've heard in years has been nearly all electronic."

Pitchfork: The timing of this aggressive United Nations music is interesting since you published a Talkhouse piece about paying $2,000 for xx tickets and lauded electronic labels like Ghostly and Tri Angle as the vanguard of pop.

GR: The future of punk rock has nothing to do with guitars. Everything interesting that I've heard in years has been nearly all electronic. I think HTRK, which is like a dub band, is the closest thing to rock music where I've thought, “Hey, this is interesting!” I like Lower, I like Fucked Up. Is it interesting? I don't know. It's good! It reminds me of stuff that I grew up on.

That's why I wanted to approach UN as an art project rather than just a band. Because as a band, it's just me trying to please my own basement-hardcore sensibilities that I grew up with. It's not actually the future of anything, it's totally nostalgia. Yet we approach it with all these different twists and turns, having it be like a philosophical thing. And all the artists we've aligned ourselves with are electronic! Like, James Cauty, who did the artwork for the first record with the Beatles on fire, is a member of the KLF, who got in so much trouble [for early sampling], and that's a huge touchstone for us. And then the art for "Never Mind the Bombings, Here's Your Six Figures" was by Ben Frost, who’s amazing.

We’re not a band that's going to just grind out these tours and play music and try and claim to be progressive in any way. That's not the be-all end-all of the project. It’s the lyrics and the art and the fact that we have this unfolding drama across the legal system about what art is, what it's allowed to do, what it's allowed to borrow from, and whether art ever crosses the line where it's dangerous. The United Nations are claiming that we are a dangerous thing because people will come seeking our assistance instead of the real United Nations, which seems absurd, right?

United Nations: "United Nations vs. United Nations" (via SoundCloud)

Pitchfork: How does the actual United Nations tell a band that they need to take down their Facebook page?

GR: We were really lucky that we never put copyrights on any of our songs, so we never registered ourselves as the United Nations. We, personally, have never pressed anything, and we've never distributed anything except for having somebody sell records at shows. So the UN actually couldn't serve us, because our names weren't attached to it. So our record company got served, our merch company got served, our publicist got served, and the cease-and-desist letter is actually the cover of the cassette in the boxed set—we actually wrapped it around all the cassettes, which is probably going to get us into a lot of trouble.

As much as the band is a joke, I do think that it's really important that people who make art are actually protecting the human experience of just being alive and not having to be crushed all the time. Art is the one thing that’s the universal virtue that you can have in any class. There's definitely privilege in the upper classes, but as a whole, music can be enjoyed by anybody who can gather around a radio. So I take it super seriously that we're protected at all costs. So when people say, “If you don't get copyrighted, you can't get paid for it,” well, nobody's doing it to get paid. And if putting our names on it is going to get us dismantled, then I'd rather just be a thing that we get to make and a set of ideas that people get to talk about. That's why I love criticism, too! So UN is a chance to do both: play and write about music at the same time.

Pitchfork: One of the most clearly audible lyrics on the record is "please don't take these things too seriously." Are you concerned that people are going to miss the jokes?

GR: I hate trying to make it explicit that certain things are jokes, but I feel like people do misunderstand. I've worked with [producer] Dave Fridmann a lot, and one thing he says is, "You can't be explicit enough. People aren't really paying attention when they're listening to your record, so unless you're shouting exactly what you want them to hear, they don't pay attention." So I do think some of the jokes get lost, and that's too bad because humor is an important part of presenting serious matters. Without it, there's almost no contrast. That's why I love somebody like Kanye West, because everybody either hates or loves him. He's a complex human being. Sometimes he's saying really interesting stuff and sometimes he's being a total piece of shit. That is what it means to be a human.