Thornhill Talk Creative Inspirations Behind New Album 'BODIES'

As Melbourne metalcore favourites Thornhill gear up to unleash their new album BODIES on our eardrums this Friday, 4th April off the back of a trio of SOLD OUT intimate album preview shows across the East Coast, Music Feeds thought we’d find out more juicy details about what we can all expect from the band’s forthcoming third studio LP.

Here, Thorny members Jacob Charlton and Ethan McCann run us through all the key musical, cultural and creative influences that helped shape the DNA of BODIES, from 90’s music, to high fashion runways, to pivoting away from traditional metalcore vocals to embrace a more R&B style. You can read everything they had to say down below, or pre-order the album right here.

Thornhill – ‘TONGUES’

NINE INCH NAILS

Jacob Charlton: NIN was definitely a huge influence on BODIES.
Ethan McCann: Yeah, the WITH_TEETH Nine Inch Nails era, the colour scheme of the artwork and the sonics of that album and that era in general of Nine Inch Nails was a big initial influence for us for this album.

STRANGERS ONLY

Ethan: I would also say My Ticket Home by Strangers Only. I feel like that album was slept on at the time, but we always thought they were massively ahead of the curve. It’s just a really cool bouncy, angsty record, and we wanted to incorporate some of that bouncy sort of 90s feel to our music.
Jacob: That adolescent kind of “fuck you” heavy music, but done our way.

BATMAN BEYOND

Jacob: I’m also adding Batman Beyond. That’s it, just Batman Beyond.

DIESEL RUNWAYS

Jacob: This is maybe more for me and [Ben] Maida, but another inspiration is Diesel runways, and a lot of the high fashion runways. A lot of them have a darkness about them, but there’s also a strong thematic base that feels like: I’m just gonna do this idea, it doesn’t really matter if it’s good or bad or if you like it; as long as we go absolutely balls to the walls with it. I think we were watching a lot of that when we were talking about the fashion of the record, and the fashion of what we want TTC [Thornhill Thread Collective] to eventually be, and the popup stores that we do, things like that. So, Diesel the brand was definitely a big one.
Ethan: DIESEL is obviously the name of the first song on the album too, and for that track name it was kind of two birds, one stone, because I think we all thought about the old Fast & Furious movies when we listened to that first track.
Jacob: Nitro!
Ethan: Yeah, Vin Diesel and gas and the runway – it all came together.
Jacob: And that song was actually originally called BODIES.

FOUNDATIONAL BANDS

Jacob: There’s always going to be mention of Jeff Buckley, Radiohead and Gorillaz too. They’re always going to have their influence on us, they’ve always taken a hold of every decision we make just from the base of our childhood. It’s the 90’s-ness about it, always. That’s a foundation for us always. And this album definitely is way less Deftones-focused than Heroine was for sure, I think we went more to the source on this one.
Ethan: Yeah, I think when we discovered Deftones, probably around 2018, 2019, 2020, they just showed us different ways to think about heavy music that wasn’t metalcore that we knew. We realised we can still write a heavy song and it can be a heavy rock song, which doesn’t have to be in the package of a modern metalcore song. And I think we took that concept and just applied our own flavours to it – and that’s where we are now.

R&B MEETS VOCAL EVOLUTION

Jacob: For me specifically on the vocal side of things, I don’t listen to heavy music and I don’t really like scream delivery. It’s very uninspiring for me, and so I needed to find somebody else or something else to showcase things differently. In that vein, old R&B is a big influence, and especially the album NO HANDS by Joey Valance & Brae. It’s Beastie Boys-inspired, and I think a lot of the flow and delivery is more hard-hitting. And even though the word is so dated, the swagger of it is definitely something I was influenced by, and it was something I had to learn how to do. A lot of the work I was doing on my solo stuff was to get that effortless lag, which is really hard. It’s so hard to be effortlessly cool naturally. And I’m not, but I feel like once I put the work in on understanding what the base of that is, it was a lot easier to write heavy stuff for us. And I think a lot of that came out on this new album, especially on nerv. nerv and TONGUES really have that sort of laziness to them, somehow it’s a rhyme that’s hooky enough that I could scream it – but you still have the hook in your head. And it wasn’t a melody, but somehow it kind of was. It took three years for me to lock into that type of delivery, if I really think about it. I’ve been trying to sing like that for three years now for sure. I’ve been working on solo stuff for a long time in the background, but I’d never thought to apply it until I’d really broken in what I thought was the right sound for that. And I didn’t even think it would carry across the way that it did for Thornhill, but it was a nicer transition to get to who I could be for Thornhill. To me as a vocalist, it’s so much more important to have a personality in your voice than it is to hit notes. If you have an undeniable tone and delivery, I think that just speaks volumes to the listener a lot more than someone just with a good voice or a good melody. There’s so many layers to a vocalist than I ever thought there were. And it’s taken me 10 years of singing in this band to realise this. I learned bits and pieces as we’ve gone along, and the shift we did with Heroine really got me there. But if I was to compare my singing voice from The Dark Pool to BODIES: BODIES sounds like me now, whereas The Dark Pool just sounds like a kid trying to hit notes with no real idea about what’s going on. And that’s fine!
Ethan: I think that’s why you probably threw so much shade to The Dark Pool. Like you said, you’re still a very proficient singer and you were still writing good melodies back then. But I just don’t think you ever thought about the concept of getting any form of character into it. It was just like: the note’s here, and I have to get here. And that’s the performance. Then I think Heroine was you sort of dipping your toes into that. And then BODIES is the refining of that. I don’t think we ever really regret anything we do as much as we just sometimes throw shade on shit just to be dickheads. Truly, without The Dark Pool and Heroine, this album wouldn’t be what it is now. Everything’s just a stepping stone.