What Are You?

IT WAS ONLY FITTING that Thrice were one of the headliners of this year’s Vans Warped Tour. After all, many of the bands sharing the stage on this year’s edition of the traveling musical circus owe quite a debt to Thrice, who were mixing metal riffs with melodic vocals long before every mall had a Hot Topic and every car full of suburban teens was blasting Hawthorne Heights. However, as Thrice drummer Riley Breckenridge explained on a sweltering California stop of the Warped Tour, Thrice’s forthcoming album, Vheissu [pronounced “Vee-Sue” – ed], the band is taking a more studied approach; expanding their sound by adding new instruments to the mix, further complementing frontman Dustin Kensrue’s always intellectually stimulating lyrics. Translated literally, Vheissu is German for both “Who are you?” or “What are you?” but according to Breckenridge, the real meaning behind the album’s title is far more nebulous.

I’ve heard a few different explanations of what Vheissu is supposed to mean. What’s the real truth?
The truth of the matter is that there really is no meaning to it, and that was kind of the reason that we chose it, is that it’s not a loaded word. It’s not something where you hear the word, or hear the album title and it makes you think of something. If you go online, there are a few deconstructions of the word. It’s kind of fun to put it into Google and just kind of wander around the Internet. You can find out some pretty interesting stuff. Some of the meanings out there contributed to our reasons for choosing the title. But we just wanted to pick a word that would come to represent the album in the same way that a band’s name comes to represent that band and their songs.

So you want to leave it open for people to come to their own conclusions about what the title means?
Totally. And if you care to do research and figure out what it’s all about, then go for it. If you don’t care, then don’t.

Sonically, what’s this record all about? Is it a continuation of the last one, or is it something altogether different?
With this record we had a lot more time to write it and a lot more time to experiment.
With the last record we only had three months to write and record. We had some goals with the last record as far as bringing in new instrumentation and just trying out new things as far as songwriting goes that we didn’t really have time to implement. This time around we did have time to do that. We added some piano stuff, synthesizers, Rhodes piano, a lot of really cool instrumentation. One of the biggest differences between this record and other records of ours is the gap in dynamics: the mellow parts are so much more mellow than anything we’ve ever done and the heavy parts are really heavy, as heavy as anything we’ve ever done. We wanted to make the songs a little like a soundtrack, where the changes in the chords and the movement of the music really moves
you emotionally.
You guys took like nine months to make this record. Was it kind of scary to have that much time?
It was a little bit scary because we’d do a demo, listen to it, then change something and then do another demo and keep changing and changing and changing. But after nine months, we kind of got a good perspective and we could go back and realize that for a few of the songs, the original demos we did were the best things we’d done. But it was definitely nice to have time to experiment and really have some time to sit with the songs and make sure we were really happy with them.

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