The Thermals are done. After a 15-year career that produced precisely no bad albums and a couple of truly great ones, the Portland, Oregon-based indie rock trio are breaking up. Co-frontman Hutch Harris announced the news on Twitter this morning.
This sucks! Ambitious storytellers with bucketloads of conviction, a little snarl, and a seemingly preternatural understanding of powerpop melodies, The Thermals never really lost their touch. The Body, the Blood, the Machine, released in 2006, will be the bulk of their legacy, and that's just fine—it's a witty and brilliantly paranoid response to the Bush-Cheney era, thick with biblical allusions and near-perfect pop songs. But they were still killing it on 2016's We Disappear, an album that didn't get nearly enough credit for trying to parse our techno-nightmare present without coming across as pompous or annoying. It would have been fun to see where they took things from here.
Hopefully Harris and Thermals bassist Kathy Foster will end up working together again; it's nice to hear that a band has broken up with honest-to-God no animosity. But still. This is just a bit of a bummer. Here's the video for The Body…'s "Pillar of Salt."Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.