THUS LOVE - All Pleasure (2024) [Hi-Res]

Stimulation is easy to come by these days. Streaming platforms and social media offer us endless fleeting moments of diversion that keep what we call the “pleasure zones” of our brains lit up morning till night. But for such a supposedly hedonistic time, real pleasure—the kind that feeds our soul rather than draining it, that makes us feel good instead of just distracting us from the fact that we feel bad—is in shockingly short supply.

The second LP by Brattleboro, Vermont’s THUS LOVE is full of that kind of nourishing euphoria. It swoons, shakes, and swaggers with a combination of grit and sensuality that’s been hard to locate in music lately. It fills your brain with barbed melodic hooks that once they sink in don’t budge. It punches at the clouds and makes you want to do the same. It’s called, fittingly, All Pleasure.

The album came out of a period of dizzying growth and transformation for the group. When they began work on it, vocalist/guitarist Echo Mars (they/them) and drummer Louie Racine (he/him) were still reeling from the runaway success of their 2022 debut full-length, Memorial—a set of lush, elegant post-punk that brought praise from The FADER, the NME, and the Guardian, plus a leap from quiet Brattleboro to stages across the US and UK—along with processing the departure of founding bassist Nathaniel van Osdol. Meanwhile, new bassist Ally Juleen (she/they) and guitarist/keyboardist Shane Blank (he/him), longtime musical partners, had uprooted their lives to relocate to small-town Vermont and join a band that was a month away from recording the follow-up to a cultishly adored album.

“We were all coming together to make this new thing and take a new step,” Mars says. “We've all been making music for a while, and we’ve all been confronted with aspects of it that are grueling and not pleasurable.” When the group convened in a barn in the woods that Mars had transformed into a recording studio the band calls their “Hobbit Hole,” they kept one simple rule at the forefront: “If it's not joyful,” says Mars, “don't do it.”

What emerged from that simple mission is a stunningly gorgeous album, full of big, arcing melodies and a whole range of kinky stylistic twists that will surprise listeners who know the group just for their first album’s chorus-drenched 80s-style psychedelia. “Birthday Song” gives grungy glam rock with a stride that’s new for the band, but fits them perfectly, via a transcendent hook that underlines Echo’s lyrical tribute to communal joy. “Get Stable” transmutes existential panic—“I can’t get stable / Is that what I’m afraid of?”–into sharp-angled punk pop. The anthemic title track—the last song written for the album, and the first to be written by the entire quartet—is something like the album’s mission statement, with Echo and Ally splitting vocal duties as they pay tribute to the power of joyful creation: “I ain’t high but I feel good,” Echo sings, “Like a drug but I don’t come down.”

Mixed by Matthew Hall and Rich Costey (on “Birthday Song”, “All Pleasure”, and “Get Stable”) and mastered by Bob Weston, All Pleasure was recorded as live as possible, with a bare minimum of overdubs, capturing the sheer infectious ecstasy that comes from a group of people sharing space together, making a divine racket. On top of being just a great album, it’s also a persuasive argument for ditching the algorithm, going off the grid, and finding a barn to hole up in with some friends and a bunch of instruments. On “House on the Hill,” Echo sneeringly sums up the empty feeling of living for nothing but likes: “Anything for convenience / anything for the gram,” she sings. “It feels like we’re never gonna get out of here.” Put on All Pleasure, tap into the energy and the message that THUS LOVE is putting out, and you just might find an escape.