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Brattleboro band THUS LOVE finds pleasure in a new era
THUS LOVE’s November record “All Pleasure” is not, in fact, pure rapture.
Throughout the Brattleboro band’s sophomore album, frontperson Echo Mars slices through a thicket of angular rock with their less-than-chipper musings. “Anything for convenience/ Anything for the ‘gram,” they lament on “House On A Hill,” jeering at life’s top priorities in the 2020s. On “Losing A Friend,” their voice softens to grapple with the ache of loss, remarking “Innocence has left me now/ Holding onto faces fading.”
Then there’s the linchpin of “All Pleasure,” a concerned query from the title track: “What’s in store for you and me/ When all pleasure retires?”
The band members will face that question almost nightly this winter, as they embark on a North American tour supporting The Vaccines, which includes a stop at Royale on Saturday, Jan. 18.
“I would say, in a nutshell, it's more about the relationship with pleasure, not the pleasure itself,” Mars says of the record. “There's a sense of irony in it as well, because there are aspects of that record that are just fully about loss.”
Yet “All Pleasure” remains one of the biggest musical treats of 2024, both for rock fans and Vermonters who can finally cite someone besides Noah Kahan as one of the state’s rising stars. As for THUS LOVE, the inherent joy of assembling the record provided an anchor during a recent transitional period for the band.
The band the world met via “Memorial,” the group’s acclaimed debut record, is not quite the same THUS LOVE fans will see on stage this winter. Their lineup has changed, for one. The band began as a tight trio: Mars, bassist Nathaniel van Osdo and drummer Lu Racine. But when van Osdol departed from the project in 2023, THUS LOVE expanded to include bassist Ally Juleen and guitarist/keyboardist Shane Blank, who are both members of the Boston art-rock outfit Bat House. The two bands witnessed each other’s sharp performance skills in 2022 when they both shared a bill with Flossing at The Sultan Room in New York.
The timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous; the then-fledgling THUS LOVE was gearing up to unveil “Memorial,” while Bat House was promoting its record “Twenty Mule Team” and inching toward a “deep, deep sleep” as a project, Juleen says.
“We made the ‘20 Mule Team’ album by ourselves in our bedroom during COVID,” she explains. “It's kind of an emotional decision, but after that, we were like, ‘Let's set this down for a bit, take a break.’”
When van Osdol left THUS LOVE the following year, Mars and Racine regrouped with Juleen and Blank. As they charted the thematic terrain of “All Pleasure,” Mars’ frequent talk of joy offered a secure, refreshing atmosphere for the new bandmates.
“That comforted me, because I think for how much Bat House changed my life, at the end, there was very little pleasure in it for me,” Juleen says. “Having the word ‘pleasure’ and whatever it means to you on a daily basis in my back pocket, [when] being in a new band, is comforting.”
Over the course of a few months, THUS LOVE forged “All Pleasure” from Mars’ then-living quarters: a former carriage house in Putney they nicknamed “Hobbit Hole.” As the band recorded new songs in the solitude of the Vermont woods, another shift within the band became apparent. THUS LOVE now agrees that the label of “queer post-punk” — which they had previously used as a descriptor around the release of “Memorial” — wasn’t the right fit anymore.
While their sound remains brilliantly serrated, “All Pleasure” treads away from post-punk and toward radio-ready rock. “In my head, it sounds like Top 40 rock,” Mars says. “I'm in full support of accessible music — I love accessible guitar music.”
What band members share about their own identities, however, has become less accessible — partly for privacy, and partly to avoid selling “an idea of themselves” instead of their actual music.
“Continuing to drill [queer post-punk] into people as we go on — we all agreed, it's not really people's business,” Juleen says.
Adds Mars: “There have been several long stretches of this band where it's been predominantly queer members. I think that's still true, but it really doesn't f---ing matter. On this record, I was like, ‘Don't put our pronouns on there,’ cause I don't f---ing care anymore. I'm not speaking to apathy within gender politics — I'm mostly saying that, if it's not a necessary limitation, why inflect it in your art?”
It’s an attitude that fully aligns with THUS LOVE’s current shift. Bucking labels, setting boundaries, and unapologetically evolving with kindred artists: that is what it means to find “All Pleasure.”
