The Thermals - We Disappear (2016)

The Thermals are best at making songs you put on mixtapes named ‘Drunken Sing-alongs When You’re Sad.’ They specialize in late-night, secret conversations about feeling simultaneously romantic and resentful over being raised Catholic. They’re the soundtrack to breaking glass, and an ode to the beauty of brokenness. They say that the mark of intelligence is the ability to hold two disparate and conflicting truths in the mind at the same time: I am a good person; I am not a good person. We Disappear lives in this delicate, in-between place: at once hard and noisy, while also soft and personal. And seeming contradictions abound on this album. We Disappear is an all-too-real, dark, and intensely personal album – in the past most of singer Hutch Harris' lyrics have been mostly fictitious tales – about how we try to outrun demise, whether personal or physical. It is an emotional document of how two people can tear each other apart, while simultaneously making you wanna get up and jump around the room. A lot of We Disappear is about regret, i.e. still loving someone after a break-up and hanging on to these feelings, but it’s also about separation in terms of technology, how it can isolate us and impact our relationships, and how humans have embraced it to the point where we’ve already assimilated into it. “The Great Dying” and “Into the Code” examine how we’re so afraid we’re going to be forgotten, or overlooked, that we upload everything about our lives onto the Internet. We Disappear features the longest running Thermals line-up of Hutch Harris, Kathy Foster, and Westin Glass, and that it was recorded in Portland, OR at Kung Fu Bakery (The Shins, Tegan and Sara) and in Seattle, WA at The Hall of Justice (Nirvana, Mudhoney), and produced by Chris Walla (formerly of Death Cab For Cutie).