Toward the end of Thursday’s first run, touring had become a chore. Rule recalled pantomiming a clock-punching motion before taking the stage, laying bare the worst possible scenario for the band since its members dropped out of Rutgers University as teenagers: Thursday had curdled into a deadening day job that most people would still dream of occupying, leaving them feeling “both underpaid and greedy,” Rickly said.
After the band’s split, Rule kept busy as a session drummer, including a long stint with the British boy band the Wanted. Pedulla returned to a steady gig doing film work, while Rickly’s curiosity and conviviality resulted in a series of fiascoes. His puckish, conceptual hardcore supergroup United Nations was hit with a cease-and-desist from the actual United Nations. In 2013, Rickly was mugged at gunpoint, an event that plays an integral role in “Someone Who Isn’t Me,” a surrealist, autofictional account of kicking heroin through an experimental treatment with the drug ibogaine. He worked with No Devotion, a band featuring former members of Lostprophets, whose ex-frontman was convicted of child sex abuse, and kept busy at Collect Records, an indie label that dissolved in 2015 after outrage over its benefactor Martin Shkreli.
By the time Thursday re-emerged from its hiatus in 2016, it had endured the recession of emo’s third wave and stood on high moral ground. “They went through the major label machine, but always kept their values intact,” Jeremy Bolm of the hardcore band Touché Amoré said.
“Full Collapse” had served as a sonic touchstone not just for the thriving emo revival, but for metal bands like Deafheaven. And for all of his troubles, Rickly — a spirited social media user who forged friendships with writers, musicians, artists, poets and chefs — had managed to ingratiate himself as a fixture in New York’s arts and food scenes.
Dan Ozzi, the author of the 2021 book “Sellout,” which charts how major labels chased punky bands with loyal followings, acknowledged that Rickly’s social skills have played a major role in Thursday’s sustained relevance, but said the band’s songs also simply hold up. “A lot of Thursday’s peers have aged like milk,” he said in an interview. “You go see them at these emo nostalgia festivals and realize you’re watching a 45-year-old dude sing murder fantasies about his high school girlfriend.” Thursday, by contrast, “were always on a higher, more intellectual level.”
But like so many bands of its era with bills to pay and a reputation to uphold, Thursday isn’t above indulging in emo nostalgia. “I used to get really bummed on being like, ‘We’re doing “Full Collapse” tonight,’” Rule admitted.
