Thus Love Returns With New Single 'Birthday Song'

Brattleboro, Vermont breakthrough outfit THUS LOVE is set to release All Pleasure, the sophomore full-length due for release November 1st, 2024 on Captured Tracks. The album’s announcement is accompanied by the release of lead-single “Birthday Song,” which finds THUS LOVE roaring back to life with a grungy glam salvo that boldly celebrates their new era.

The “Birthday Song” single release comes with a video directed by Augie Voss & Benni Shumlin, shot on location in Southern Vermont, and the confirmation of extensive Tour Dates (SEE ALL DATES BELOW).

 

Vocalist/guitarist Echo Mars shares the following: “‘Birthday Song’ is a simple song about friendship and how we sometimes don’t give those kinds of platonic relationships the respect and care they need to thrive. We don’t have the same language that we do for romantic partnerships but I think those relationships are every bit as important in making us feel safe, secure and validated. When it came time to select the first single, ‘Birthday Song’ felt like the perfect way to introduce the new version of Thus Love and our new friends, Ally and Shane.” 

Video directors Augie Voss & Benni Shumlin share: "Working with Thus Love is always a pleasure. It's a rare and wonderful occasion where everyone on set is as big of a freak as we are. We sought to capture this new era of the band with a mishmash of lust, ruralness, yearning, pop, and queerdom. Party-girl and forager alike can get down. For this visual we were excited to lean into the ethereal gay magic that Southern Vermont in the summer can conjure - a world of moss and swamps and sun, where the line between human and creature starts to blur."

Stimulation is easy to come by these days. Streaming platforms and social media offer us endless fleeting moments of diversion that keep what we call the “pleasure zones” of our brains lit up morning till night. But for such a supposedly hedonistic time, real pleasure—the kind that feeds our soul rather than draining it, that makes us feel good instead of just distracting us from the fact that we feel bad—is in shockingly short supply.

The second LP by Brattleboro, Vermont’s THUS LOVE is full of that kind of nourishing euphoria. It swoons, shakes, and swaggers with a combination of grit and sensuality that’s been hard to locate in music lately. It fills your brain with barbed melodic hooks that once they sink in don’t budge. It punches at the clouds and makes you want to do the same. It’s called, fittingly, All Pleasure.

The album came out of a period of dizzying growth and transformation for the group. When they began work on it, vocalist/guitarist Echo Mars (they/them) and drummer Lu Racine (he/they) were still reeling from the runaway success of their 2022 debut full-length, Memorial—a set of lush, elegant post-punk that brought praise from The FADER, NME, and The Guardian, plus a leap from quiet Brattleboro to stages across the US and UK—along with processing the departure of founding bassist Nathaniel van Osdol. Meanwhile, new bassist Ally Juleen (she/they) and guitarist/keyboardist Shane Blank (he/him), longtime musical partners, had uprooted their lives to relocate to small-town Vermont and join a band that was

“We were all coming together to make this new thing and take a new step,” Mars says. “We've all been making music for a while, and we’ve all been confronted with aspects of it that are grueling and not pleasurable.” When the group convened in a barn in the woods that Mars had transformed into a recording studio the band calls their “Hobbit Hole,” they kept one simple rule at the forefront: “If it's not joyful,” says Mars, “don't do it.”

What emerged from that simple mission is a stunningly gorgeous album, full of big, arcing melodies and a whole range of kinky stylistic twists that will surprise listeners who know the group just for their first album’s chorus-drenched ‘80s-style psychedelia. “Birthday Song” gives grungy glam rock with a stride that’s new for the band, but fits them perfectly, via a transcendent hook that underlines Echo’s lyrical tribute to communal joy. “Get Stable” transmutes existential panic—“I can’t get stable / Is that what I’m afraid of?”–into sharp-angled punk pop. The anthemic title track—the last song written for the album, and the first to be written by the entire quartet—is something like the album’s mission statement, with Echo and Ally splitting vocal duties as they pay tribute to the power of joyful creation: “I ain’t high but I feel good,” Echo sings, “Like a drug but I don’t come down.”

Mixed by Matthew Hall and Rich Costey (on “Birthday Song”, “All Pleasure”, and “Get Stable”) and mastered by Bob Weston, All Pleasure was recorded as live as possible, with a bare minimum of overdubs, capturing the sheer infectious ecstasy that comes from a group of people sharing space together, making a divine racket. On top of being just a great album, it’s also a persuasive argument for ditching the algorithm, going off the grid, and finding a barn to hole up in with some friends and a bunch of instruments. On “House on the Hill,” Echo sneeringly sums up the empty feeling of living for nothing but likes: “Anything for convenience / anything for the gram,” she sings. “It feels like we’re never gonna get out of here.” Put on All Pleasure, tap into the energy and the message that THUS LOVE is putting out, and you just might find an escape.

THUS LOVE - Tour Dates

* w/ Man/Woman/Chainsaw

& w/ Robber Robber

8/24/24 - Reading, UK - Reading Festival

8/25/24 - Leeds, UK - Leeds Festival

8/26/24 - Glasgow, UK - The Hug & Pint *

8/27/24 - Birmingham, UK - Hare & Hounds *

8/28/24 - London, UK - Oslo Hackney *

8/30/24 - Brighton, UK - Brighton Psych Fest

8/31/24 - Manchester, UK - Manchester Psych Fest

9/1/24 - Salisbury, UK - End of the Road Festival

11/01/24 - Brattleboro, VT - The Stone Church &

11/08/24 - Brooklyn, NY - Elsewhere Zone One &

11/10/24 - Burlington, VT - Radio Bean &

2/08/25 - Phoenix, AZ - Valley Bar

2/10/25 - Houston, TX - WOMH

2/11/25 - Austin, TX - Mohawk

2/12/25 - Dallas, TX - Club Dada

2/14/25 - Nashville, TN - Drkmttr

2/15/25 - Atlanta, GA - Vinyl

2/17/25 - Raleigh, NC - Pinhook

2/18/25 - Baltimore, MD - Metro Gallery

2/19/25 - Troy, NY - No Fun

Tracklisting

1.On The Floor

2.Birthday Song

3.Get Stable

4.All Pleasure

5.FaceTo Face

6.Lost In Translation

7.Show Me Patience

8.House On A Hill

9.Bread For Blood

10.Losing A Friend

Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez

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