

Thursday’s Tom Keeley (left) and
Steve Pedulla onstage with their guitars
of choice—Fender American
Standard
Telecasters with Seymour Duncan
Hot Rails bridge pickups.
Photo by Dave Summers
Since emerging from the late-’90s
hardcore underground and achieving
wide acclaim, Thursday has been
credited with helping pave the way for
modern-rock heavyweights like My
Chemical Romance, exposing the world
to great new hardcore bands via the opening
slots on their tours, and maintaining
street cred by recording with up-and-coming
bands like Japan’s Envy. More
than anything though, Thursday will be
remembered for defining the emo/post-hardcore
blueprint via Steve Pedulla and
Tom Keeley’s scintillating dual-guitar
attack, Geoff Rickly’s passionate singing
and open-hearted lyrics, and the utterly
dominating rhythm section of bassist Tim
Payne and drummer Tucker Rule.
Indulging in extreme dynamics while
melody battles discordance is Pedulla and
Keeley’s
raison d’être. This juxtaposition was
first explored on the band’s second album,
Full Collapse—which they have been recently
performing in its entirety to celebrate its
10-year anniversary. Thursday’s major-label
debut,
War All the Time expanded on the
sound with a keener sense of eloquence as
pianos and choirs found their way into the
oft-ferocious mix. The band’s 2009 release,
Common Existence, showed a conscious shift
away from the post-hardcore constraints
they helped establish, and now their sixth
album,
No Devoluci—n, finds them exploring
deep valleys and high peaks—be they emotional
or melodic, expressed in subtler or
more intriguing ways.
“There are traditional chord structures in
things we do,” explains Keeley, “but there
was sort of an effort to circumvent the guitar
or approach guitar parts other than thinking
of them as guitar parts—kind of undoing
the guitar as a traditional rock instrument
and using these different effects, chord structures,
and strumming patterns to make a
more nebulous, melodic vehicle.”
As Pedulla puts it, “A big part of what
makes us Thursday is that there are sometimes
parts that are almost two leads going
on, and they interlock in some strange or
unconventional way—so there’s definitely a
different dynamic to how we write. It’s the
type of thing where both of us will be vamping
on a part to try and find what we’re going
to play, and we sort of have this unspoken
rule where we say, ‘Right . . . bear with me.
I’m going to fall on my face a lot—but I
will find something.’ We have that trust. We
know we’re not being judged by each other.”
Keeley agrees. “It’s a million different
things—it’s never the same equation
twice. Sometimes we just ignore each
other and play as many notes as possible.
Sometimes we dictate to each other.
I think it’s safe to say there’s a mutual
respect for our different points of view
and different practices of guitar playing.
I couldn’t imagine these songs without
Steve’s unique voice. It’s a weird alchemy,
a weird experiment. There are a lot of
mistakes, a lot of revisions, and tons and
tons of editing, historically anyway. And,
eventually, even if our parts are fighting
each other, we know when it’s working
and we know when it’s not.”

Pedulla reaches to the nether regions of his Tele’s fretboard. Photo by Elise Shively
As far as “nebulous melodic vehicles” are
concerned, it’d be hard to argue that Keeley
and Pedulla have been anything but successful
on that front with
No Devoluci—n. Written in
the wake of Rickly’s divorce, it has an emotional
rawness set to churning fury, chiming
elegance, and wreaths of eclectic treatments.
“But the whole record isn’t that,” Keeley is
quick to add. “It’s not like our guitars sound
like ghosts or anything! We certainly have a
lot of power chords and traditional angular
guitar work—which is sort of our thing. In
that sense, it was business as usual. But with
[producer] Dave Fridmann, there’s a lot of
attention to pushing things toward the weird.”
Fridmann has produced Thursday’s last
three records, but reportedly it was the latest
one—which was barely demoed at all and
was written in just a week—that particularly
fired his imagination. What is it about
Fridmann that keeps the band coming back
to him for production duties?
“You rely on Dave to tell you when to cut
the shit, quit thinking, and just play,” says
Keeley. “But if I say to him ‘Hey, man, I don’t
know if this part is right for this record—how
does this sound?’ he’ll reply ‘It sounds like a
guitar.’ That means it’s my responsibility to dial
in exactly what I need. In the past, I’ve gone,
‘I’ve got no idea what guitar tone I want—
what do you think would be a good idea?’ to
other producers, and they’ll come up with all
these suggestions. Dave does do this on occasion—
he’ll fine-tune things—but generally it’s
‘What do you want it to sound like? What’s
your vision?’ That’s scary, but ultimately it
forces us to become better musicians with better
ears. He generally trusts our gut and our
instincts, as far as getting into the weird spots.
It’s terrifying—but completely empowering.”
For a band of self-described non-musicians,
Thursday encompasses a scope and spectrum
of aural possibility that’s perhaps wider than
musicians who play “by the rules.” Thursday’s
distinct sound has always revolved around
Pedulla’s and Keeley’s clashing tones. Clean
melodies run parallel to each other before
soaring through molten distortion, generally
grappling with each other and causing
semitone clashes, off-kilter countermelodies,
and ending in all sorts of pleasing chaos. You
expect dropped-D tunings, escalating octave
melodies, furious tremolo picking alongside
thrashed minor 7th chords, and, more often
than not, the delight of crashing from clean,
intricate chords to full-tilt, metal-tinged riffs.
Light chorus and a splash of delay keep the
flashier melodies sounding like they’ll float
into forever, but it’s the stop-start breakdowns
punctuated by complete silence that define
Thursday’s guitar MO.
Devolving the Guitar
For
No Devoluci—n, Thursday’s guitar team
endeavored to unlearn the guitar—to
almost completely deprogram their whole
style, only occasionally bringing in their
familiar melodic impalement. “Not every
song has that,” Pedulla says, “but we really
like to have a wide dynamic range in terms
of getting real quiet and clean—and then
really heavy. It’s a keystone of what we do,
for sure. A good example is on the last song
on the record, ‘Stay True.’ It does the same
thing but in a completely different way.”
The song in question begins with an electric
guitar that’s so gently picked it’s almost
imperceptible. The drums enter, followed
closely by a flood of EBowed feedback in
the background. There’s a tension that sits
underneath the calm and, three minutes
into the seven-minute epic, Rickly’s voice
becomes histrionic and the guitars build up
along with the pummeling drums. Though it
never reaches the abrasive levels of previous
material, there’s a simmering darkness that
never would’ve come across in the vicious
heaviness of their older material.
Pedulla and Keeley are happy to discuss
some of their favorite guitar moments on
No
Devoluci—n, as well as how they managed to
get some of the more out-there sounds on the
record. The first track, “Fast to the End”, has
a wild noise solo—a warped, Tom Morello-esque
skittering across fluctuating pitches. “It
was a lot of fun to do—and I’m actually wondering
how I’m going to recreate it live—but
I know I’ll figure it out,” Pedulla says. “I had
set up various filter and modulation settings
on one of those Line 6 M13s, and I also put
some parameters into the expression pedal to
control each one. So I would hit a chord and
switch back and forth between the different
settings and also work the expression pedal.
On some of the takes, I wasn’t even aware of
the guitar—I would have it on the floor, hit
the note, and then just play the pedals with
my hands and kind of go for it. We started to
realize that when you go to this effect, it does
this thing and that’s a good opening, and
then when you go to this, that’s a great mid
section, and this is a good closing. So it was
almost directed improv.”
In comparison, Keeley contributes a beautiful,
slightly atonal melody to the skeletal
and haunting ballad of loss, “Empty Glass.”
But while the duo envisioned the type of
vibe you hear on the album, the way they
got it was actually a mistake.

Keeley (left) engages his bridge pickup and barres high on
the neck as Thursday’s
keyboardist, Andrew Everding, strums . . . you guessed it—a Telecaster with a Duncan
Hot Rails bridge pickup. Photo by Elise Shively
“We recorded it during the last session,”
says Keeley. “Geoff had the vocal part and
the Hammond organ part and not much
else. We knew we needed to finish it, so it
fell on me to make the glitchy instrumental
sections. I was really excited about that, but
it was very frustrating to make, too. It ended
up as a clean guitar run through a reverb
pedal and a Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler.
Instead of strumming, I just turned the
reverb and gain up and fretted the string
with my strumming-hand finger. With all
that sustain, I was able to play the guitar
more like a violin. There were six layers
of the main progression and six layers of
harmonies, and that was going to be the
part—this forward-moving thing. But then
I accidentally stepped on the DL4’s loop
reverse-play button, and it was suddenly a
more powerful piece in reverse—with these
suspended melodies and a weird timing that
pulls you along in this uncertain way. The
sweet note of the progression is delayed just
a little bit too much, and at first I was like
‘Ah
man, I wish I’d taken that one set of four
beats out so it hit right where I wanted.’ But
everyone was like, ‘Dude, you’ve gotta leave
it—that’s what’s going to really engage people
and make them listen more intently.’” Keeley
adds that, if it hadn’t been for Fridmann’s
“writing doesn’t end until the mix is over”
ethos, there wouldn’t have been nearly as
many spontaneous moments like that.
But as Keeley previously mentioned,
No
Devoluci—n isn’t all abstract soundscapes. The
whiplash switch-ups and intense guitar buildups
that have kept Thursday fans enthralled
throughout the band’s existence manifest
themselves in the savage shift from seething
fuzz to all-out saturation on “Past and Future
Ruins.” But even that has evolved.
“The chorus riff has a swing to it that we
haven’t had before. To expose myself a little
bit, it was my attempt at making a Silversun
Pickups song,” Keeley confesses with a laugh.
“I don’t think it sounds anything like them,
though—which is usually the story with me:
If I have a favorite band and I try to write
something like them, I’m usually not good
enough to nail it, y’know?”
Gear Simplicity
Despite the number of textures and deceptively
intricate ideas throughout Thursday’s
back catalog, Pedulla and Keeley have pretty
simple rigs. The latter tends to favor Marshall
and Vox AC30 amps and standard Fender
Telecasters with a Seymour Duncan Hot
Rails bridge pickup. Pedulla is a bit more
adventurous in his use of multiple effects
units, but he also favors Telecasters with a
Hot Rails bridge unit. He also has a custom
First Act hollowbody—which is also stocked
with Hot Rails.
“For some people, that’s a weird pairing—
to put that hot of a pickup in a guitar
like that,” he says of the double-cutaway,
Bigsby-outfitted guitar. “But it’s awesome,
and that got used probably the most. “Dave
also has an awesome Harmony Rocket that
we used, and I have a Jaguar that I played on
a couple of things.”
Amp-wise, Pedulla has recently gotten into
Bad Cats. “I used to use the Bogner Ecstasy
Classic for distortion and I tried various combos
for clean sounds, but I just got myself a
Bad Cat Lynx and that’s all I use now. The
second day of the tour, our front-of-house
engineer came up and was, like, ‘Dude, that is
the best your guitar has ever sounded!’ And I
feel the same way. For the first recording session,
I really wanted that Bad Cat but I didn’t
have one, so I borrowed one. After two weeks
or a month off, it became a challenge to find
one for the next session. Dave was pretty adamant
too—‘You need to make sure you have
that amp again.’ Luckily, a friend of mine
had an extra one he sold me at an amazing
deal. So that and the Line 6 M13—that’s all I
need. The only thing I use in the studio that
I don’t have in my live rig, at least for now, is
a DigiTech TimeBender Digital Delay pedal,
which is a lot of fun.”
Keeley, on the other hand, had some difficulties
with gear during the
No Devoluci—n
sessions. “When we went into the studio, a
lot of my gear was in disrepair,” he says. “So
the biggest change for me was, ‘Steve, can I
play your guitar here?’ and ‘Oh,
this doesn’t
work—but it sounds kinda cool.’ It was a
hodgepodge of amps that did or didn’t work
or were blown or wires that were disconnected.
It’s definitely strange making something
that’s going to last forever in a context where
you’re not confident in what you’re using.
It’s impossible for that not to affect
what you
play, as well as the energy of the parts. It can
add to the tension of a part or a song or just
the energy of a record. I can hear things like
that, at least in my own playing.”

Keeley sees the light live. Photo by Louise Lockhart
He missed one amp more than anything
else. “There’s a Marhsall JCM900. It’s
Geoff’s amp, but it’s the one I played in the
basement days for years and years. It has
been historically troublesome and finicky,
but it sounds fantastic. Beyond that, the
most frustrating thing was that I have a couple
of AC30s that sound fantastic, but the
noise . . . we couldn’t get rid of it no matter
what we did! That was a daily struggle.”
Home Is Where the Hardcore Is
What separates Thursday from some of the
more dubious exponents of the genre they
helped create is their willingness to embrace
newcomers
and their steadfast refusal to
turn their back on the hardcore scenes they
grew up in. Whether it’s offering opening
slots to recent up-and-comers Touché Amoré
and La Dispute on tour or Pedulla revealing
that studio communication often involves
requests such as, “Play something like an old
Quicksand drum beat,” the guys in Thursday
continue to have a hand in the DIY scenes
that made them who they are today.
“It’s a school of thought we were
exposed to at a young age, and it became
an inherent part of our personalities and
our philosophy for life,” Keeley says. “Be
authentic, don’t sell people on an idea.
Rather than selling people on an idea,
present them with a piece of art and allow
them to take it from you and accept or
reject it—and be okay with that.”
And
No Devoluci—n is indeed a piece of
art—arguably with more emotion, innovation,
and hardcore attitude than anything
Thursday has done before. All without returning
to what they’ve done before—and all
without turning their back on it, either.


LEFT: Keeley’s Marshall-and-Vox amp rig backstage before
a show. The Bogner head belongs to Thursday’s
keyboardist, Andrew Everding, who occasionally plays
rhythm guitar during live shows. Photo by Clive Patrique RIGHT: Effects-wise, Keeley keeps things quite simple—he
stomps on a Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler, a Lehle Dual
amp switcher, a Fulltone OCD, and (not pictured) a Boss
TU-2 Tuner. Photo by Clive Patrique
Keeley favors Fender American Standard
Teles with maple fretboards and Seymour
Duncan Hot Rails bridge pickups. This one
features vintage-style bridge saddles.
Photo by Dave Summers |
Tom Keeley’s Gearbox
Guitars
Fender American Standard
Telecasters with maple fretboards
and Seymour Duncan Hot Rails
bridge pickups
Amps
Marshall JCM800, Marshall 1960
AV slant Cab, Vox AC30 Hand-
Wired reissue
Effects
Fulltone OCD distortion, Lehle
Dual amp switcher, Line 6 DL4
Delay Modeler, Boss TU-2 Tuner
Miscellaneous
DR Strings (.010, .013, .017, .030,
.044, .052), Dunlop .60 mm Tortex
picks, Mogami cables with Neutrik
plugs, Line 6 Relay G50 wireless

LEFT: Pedulla recently got hooked on the Bad Cat Lynx—a 50-
watt, 2-channel head driven by EL34s—which he routes
through a Bogner 4x12 cabinet loaded with Celestion
Vintage 30s. Photo by Dave Summers RIGHT: When it comes to effects, Pedulla is much more of a
data head than Keeley: He uses a Voodoo Lab Ground
Control Pro MIDI foot controller (left) and a Voodoo Lab
Pedal Switcher (top middle)—as well as a Line 6 EX-1
Expression Pedal (second from right)—to expand the
capabilities of his already-stacked Line 6 M13 Stompbox
Modeler (middle). Those devices, as well as a Boss TU-2
Tuner, are powered by a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2
Plus. Photo by Dave Summers

Pedulla’s American Standard Tele has a
rosewood fretboard, a Seymour Duncan
Hot Rails bridge pickup, and newer-style
bridge saddles. Photo by Dave Summers |
Steve Pedulla’s Gearbox
Guitars
Fender American Standard
Telecaster with a rosewood fretboard
and a Seymour Duncan Hot
Rails bridge pickup
Amps
Bad Cat Lynx head, Bogner 4x12
with Celestion Vintage 30s
Effects
Line 6 M13 Stompbox Modeler, Line
6 EX-1 Expression Pedal, Voodoo Lab
Pedal Switcher, Voodoo Lab Ground
Control Pro MIDI foot controller,
Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Plus, Boss
TU-2 Tuner
Miscellaneous
DR Strings (.010, .013, .017, .030,
.044, .052), Dunlop .60 mm Tortex
picks, Mogami cables with Neutrik
plugs, Line 6 Relay G50 wireless