A Soundtrack to The Summer You Never Had
In the summer we listen to music that paints the ideal picture of what we want these 3.5 idyllic months to be. Pop culture tells us that the Beach Boys, a Drake mixtape, or any Calvin Harris track can be our de facto albeit commercialized soundtrack to the summer, but we all have our personal playlists, albums, and songs that we cling on to to craft our summer memories around. What happens though when we have had our summer stripped from us by the cold, cruel hands of COVID-19?
Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia or Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud proved itself to be prime day-drinking music with your closest pals, but I’m starting to feel these albums are becoming a bit gauche as I blare them on my shitty bluetooth speaker while making the same pasta dish from Trader Joes since quarantine started back in march. At the same time, we’re tired of moping around like it’s the end of the world like we were doing back in April. As summer enters it’s final stretch, I found myself in a state of yearning for a summer I never had; dipping into nostalgia of past summers and desperately trying to create (socially distanced and responsable) memories as a 23-year old guy who just moved to NYC should. Thankfully, there’s a forgotten band for these strange and unprecedented times - a band that I’ve had the pleasure of listening to for many years now, but now who’s music feels more relevant and potent than ever. Meet The Thrills: a 4-piece power-pop band from Dublin, Ireland.
The Thrills practically built their whole presence off the idea of yearning. They are a group of average looking Irish dudes dreaming of making a life for themselves in their own picturesque vision of Southern California. I wouldn’t call this central theme a shtick of theirs, honestly because they make this feeling sound so fucking good.
The Thrills’ three albums paints a bell curve of the highs and lows of summer. Their debut album, So Much For The City voices their frustration for the setting they’re currently in (cold and rainy Dublin) and each song is blanketed by a woozy daydreaming state of crooning for a place that can cure their homebound ailments. The opening tracks “Santa Cruz (You’re Not That Far)”, “Big Sur”, and “Don’t Steal Our Sun” seem to use an escaped love interest as an excuse to drop everything in their cold and dreary Ireland and move to California.
Just don’t go back to Big Sur, hangin' around, lettin' your old man down.
Their second album, Let’s Bottle Bohemia centers around lust and debauchery in the place they’ve dreamed of being. They sound happier and line shot themselves with confidence for fitting into the Los Angeles scene On the track “Whatever Happened to Corey Haim” Conor Deasy wails “I came to the city to build a mountain of envy and to marry a kennedy.” sounding like a classic wide-eyed and overly-ambitious european moving to California thinking they’ll make a name for themselves. On the album’s closer and arguably the band’s peak moment “The Irish Keep Gate Crashing” a swelling strings section and a jangly chorus infects you at first bite depicting the innocent, yet blissfully ignorant attempts we make at drunken romantic connections.
Lust, top 40 fame…I can smell your Catholic shame
On Let’s Bottle Bohemia, it sounds as if our lads caught their break. Sure, they sing about the rough morning afters and some of the questionable decisions they made to get there, but at least they still sound great hungover. We’ll usually scoff and follow with an ironic “good luck!” at the idea of someone moving somewhere on a whim and thinking all their problems will magically go away and they’ll make a name for themselves instantaneously. But when you listen to it now, this lofty idea feels like a sort of escapism. We can champion hubris for the sake of a good story to relate to.
Teenager, their third and unfortunately final album is a slow burn of fantasy gone sour. Sonically though, it is their richest sounding album. The band left sunny Southern California and headed north to British Columbia, and what they lacked in their typical wheelhouse of jangally guitars that blast rays of sunshine out of their tube amps, this record beautifully simmers in the melodrama and nostalgia of a carpe diem life gone by. The eponymous track “Teenager” provides the final downshift for this group. Clocking in at a bpm of someone who is half-dead, this song chugs with their trademark slide guitar and Conor’s vocals that crack not because he’s purely taking his register to the limits, but because of his anguish that sounds pretty god damn authentic if you ask me. “If I could go back to a teenager again…I’d trip over again, but where would I fall?” he laments. A year ago, I would have understood if you listened to this song and gone '“Ugh boo fucking hoo move on dude.” But man…we all feel this way to at least some degree trapped in our current setting right?
We're still waiting, waiting and waiting…
The Thrills released their final album in the summer of 2007. After tanking in sales and receiving mediocre reviews by critics they were dropped from their label and have been inactive ever since. If this piece swayed you to give their music a shot and you are left wanting more I wouldn’t count on it as they’ve been pretty quiet since being dropped. Although after some intense desk research, I was able to find a video of Conor Deasy performing their biggest hit “Big Sur” in a wedding cover band in 2018. Judging by the quality of this performance, I think it’s safe to say we won’t be hearing any new stuff from them anytime soon.
But that’s ok! Three albums from a summer band is just enough. One for the beginning, middle, and end of the season - a season we usually eagerly anticipate, bask in, then reminisce about. When we all listen to The Thrills now in the age of COVID-19 we can sing with them, not just listen. We sing for a sunnier, sanguine world to live in as they did on So Much For The City. We sing for the moments we were able to carve out, defying the odds and having a little bit of deserved fun as they did on Let’s Bottle Bohemia. And finally, we sing for the nostalgia of a life we took way too much for granted as they did Teenager. Let these songs be your companion as the summer begins to draw to a close. They’ll be your deepest sympathizer.
I know things might seem hopeless now, but there's joy to be found in this life.