As Thornhill’s Ethan McCann hops on our call, there’s an air of victory in his tone. Despite it being late in Australia, he’s cruising in on a high, having beaten his frontman to the post.
“Is Jacob not here yet?” the guitarist smirks, raising a glass of red wine to his lips. “So rare of him to be fucking late.”
It’s a playful dig that reflects the band’s dynamic – Thornhill is the product of a rock-solid friendship. “It’s a brotherly relationship,” Ethan explains, getting a little sentimental. “Jacob’s my oldest friend, and he’s become family. He can’t get rid of me now.”
When Jacob Charlton makes it onto the call, the floodgates burst open. The pair bounce off one another, balancing brotherly bickering with sarcasm. It’s an energy they admit can sometimes give off the wrong impression.
“Internationally, Australian humour can get lost in translation,” Jacob admits. “Sometimes other bands don’t catch the joke and think we’re arrogant.”
He highlights one case in 2023, when the band were supporting Holding Absence on a tour around the UK and Europe. “Holding Absence all assumed we were gonna be like high school bullies before they met us, because of how dry we were onstage,” Jacob recalls. “But if Lucas [Woodland, singer] tried to fight me, I reckon he would win. I’m sure he can swing – and he can kick those legs high, bro. I don’t have the athletic capability to compete with that. I’ll have to train… I’ll add it to the list.”
Ethan quickly cuts in with a wry smile: “Right next to becoming a good singer, right?”
Behind the shimmering soundscapes and ethereal brooding, the group were self-confessed dorks back in high school in Vermont, suburban Melbourne. Even now, the pair indulge in the nerdier side of things. Ethan’s forearm is branded with Neversoft’s skewered eyeball logo in honour of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater videogame series, while Jacob is constantly upstaged on the call by his one-eyed cat, Zuko, named after the character from animated TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender.
“We were the little nerds in the music room,” Jacob laughs.
![Thornhill - Silver Swarm [Official Music Video] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/Kfj5YXnUXsI/maxresdefault.jpg)
The pair formed the band in 2015, with drummer Ben Maida and ex-guitarist Sam Anderson, in hopes of seizing the coveted crown at Vermont Secondary College’s Battle Of The Bands.
“Our first name was Configuration,” Ethan says. “Before, we were in very different bands. Jacob was basically in a Metallica cover band, and I had more of an alternative rock upbringing. My parents used to play Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins. We sort of found the sweet spot in the middle of our Venn diagram of music taste.”
The cherry on top was the band’s music teacher. “She started showing us emo music,” Ethan smiles. “She was like our musical godmother. She pointed us in the right direction.”
Jacob even brought some choral knowledge to the table, as the frontman was part of the Australian Boys Choir for six years. “I didn’t love it,” he admits. “But I guess it made me more aware of harmonies. But then your voice changes as you grow up, and you have to learn how to use it all over again… So I basically had to start from scratch again anyway.”
Thornhill have a penchant for starting from scratch, constantly rebuilding their sound from the ground up. While 2019’s The Dark Pool set the band up as metalcore’s next big thing, offering a masterclass in technical prog and djent riffage, 2022’s Heroine was a tonal shift, bringing in soporific shoegaze and dark glamour.
Self-indulgently rich and drowning in reverb, Heroine was a love letter to 90s alt metal. Tracks such as Valentine and The Hellfire Club oozed a melt-in-your-mouth liminality, while the album’s videos were hypnotic. Arkangel’s rainy, grainy shots, reminiscent of The Crow, amplified grittier guitar tones, while Casanova’s 1960s James Bond discoball aesthetic added to the track’s woozier qualities.
“I was inspired by the overdramatic realm of cinema, particularly Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet,” Jacob explains. “That record was a whole package. The videos were equally as important as the music.”
However, the record was written over lockdown, and the band quickly realised it didn’t translate well live. “It’s hard for a crowd to enjoy a bunch of dudes playing shoegaze,” Jacob laughs. “We lacked a bit of movement on the last record, we shifted focus away from heavy music. When we went back out on the road, we remembered how fun heavier tracks are to play. On Bodies, we’re chasing the dopamine.”
New album Bodies is the perfect meeting point of The Dark Pool and Heroine, where shoegaze merges with raw, metallic distortion. Single Nerv encapsulates the band’s latest era, its weightless choruses offsetting the scratchy ferocity of each verse.
“I think Nerv is the best song we’ve ever made,” Jacob says. “It was the first track we wrote after properly getting into the stride of the record’s sound. We sent it back and forth a few times, then we were both just like, ‘This song fucking slaps.’”
“I think we forgot how to collaborate during lockdown, which is when we wrote Heroine,” Ethan chimes in. “Collaboration is how we work best. We used to record in our bassist Nick Sjogren’s parents’ house, all our minds in one room, all together. It took until halfway through Bodies to get back into our collaborative stride – Nerv was the ‘eureka’ moment. Then we went back and rewrote everything.”
While Bodies packs more bite than Heroine, the essence of nostalgia remains. Glimmers of new sounds are also thrown into the excellent mix, as Crush pulses with sultry, muted R&B influence. It’s Thornhill’s own way of dragging the 90s into the present.
“I definitely think the 90s is a massive thing for us,” Ethan adds. “We’re just 27, so maybe we’ve sort of romanticised it in our heads, but it felt like the ultimate era of expression and rebellion. Objectively, I’d also say it’s when heavy music was at its peak coolness. There was an energy about it.”
The mantra for Bodies was almost, ‘What would a 90s band do?’. “If I’d released my debut in 1995, what would I follow it up with in, say, ’99?” Ethan says. “We definitely want to try and capture the same energy as those records, that sense you’re listening to something new and definitive of the decade. We’re working towards that.”
“Our motto has always been that you should write the music that you personally want to hear,” Jacob explains. “If you’re not content with the current sound within a genre, you try to find what the scene is lacking.”
Thornhill have already earned approval from some of metalcore’s biggest names, supporting the likes of Architects and Bury Tomorrow, and have even ticked off their first UK headline shows. Today, Jacob reveals they’re going all-in to make the band a success.
“You can either be broke and do music full time, or you can be slightly less broke and have a casual job on the side – and I’m choosing to stay broke right now,” Jacob grins. “That’s just the sacrifice you make.”
Bodies is out now via UFND. Thornhill play Louder Than Life on September 19 and Aftershock on October 3.
