Thus Love Shares Title Track From 'All Pleasure' Album
The album is due for release November 1st, 2024.
By: Josh Sharpe Oct. 02, 2024
Brattleboro, Vermont breakthrough outfit THUS LOVE has shared the stomping, riff-driven, tambourine-infused title track from All Pleasure, the highly anticipated sophomore full-length due for release November 1st, 2024 on Captured Tracks.
According to vocalist/guitarist Echo Mars: "It’s no accident that we named the album after this song. ‘All Pleasure’ is the very first song we wrote collectively as a quartet and I think that collaborative spirit really comes through. The addition of Ally’s vocals as a counterpoint gives the song a very different energy and feel to it. I remember when we all listened back for the first time — it was one of those eureka moments when we all realized how special this new incarnation of Thus Love could be."
The director of the video Wes Sterrs shares: "We shot the ‘All Pleasure’ video over two days in Portland, Maine, right after THUS LOVE got back from their UK tour. Staying true to the band's surreal visual universe, we pulled from a grab bag of aesthetics: Jean Cocteau’s surrealist films, Lynch-ian oddities, Giallo dramatics, chiaroscuro-ian lighting, and even a pinch of Scooby-Doo vibes. All those influences (plus a bit of jet lag courtesy of THUS LOVE) melt together into a weirdo fever dream of satin, fingers, and flowers."
“All Pleasure” follows the September single “On The Floor,” a song that concerns itself with “how we often have to look outside of formal schooling for true education and how easy it is to be complicit in systems of oppression," opening the album with a beautiful collision of guitars and resonant vocals from Echo Mars, accompanied by an electrifying video directed by frequent collaborators Augie Voss & Benni Shumlin.
Treble named the song an Essential Track, stating: “With ‘On the Floor,’ they reveal just how far that ambition can go, with slinky, taut verses giving way to an infectious, eruptive chorus. Vocalist Echo Mars even evokes the abstract ’60s-era art-pop of Scott Walker in their croon, which is just one of the surprising elements that comes into play in this dynamic anthem.”
August saw the release of lead-single “Birthday Song,” a grungy glam salvo that boldly celebrates their new era, accompanied by a video also directed by Augie Voss & Benni Shumlin, shot on location in Southern Vermont. According to vocalist/guitarist Echo Mars, “‘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.” Upon its release, “Birthday Song” caught the attention of Stereogum, Northern Transmissions, and Rolling Stone, who named it a Song You Need To Know, noting the band’s “heavier, glam-tinged edge” and Brooklyn Vegan, who named it one of their favorite songs of the week.
THUS LOVE recently played overseas for a run of UK festival dates, wowing audiences at Reading, Leeds, and End Of The Road, and will perform in Vermont and NYC just following the album release in early November, ahead of 2025 Tour Dates, including a run supporting The Vaccines that kicks-off in mid-January, some newly added headline shows, and additional March/April EU/UK shows. SEE ALL DATES BELOW.
THUS LOVE - Tour Dates
& w/ Robber Robber
^ w/ The Vaccines
11/01/24 - Brattleboro, VT - The Stone Church &
11/08/24 - Brooklyn, NY - Elsewhere Zone One &
11/10/24 - Burlington, VT - Radio Bean &
01/16/25 - Philadelphia, PA - Union Transfer ^
01/17/25 - Brooklyn, NY - Brooklyn Steel ^
01/18/25 - Boston, MA - Royale ^
01/19/25 - Portland ME - Oxbow Blending and Bottling
01/20/25 - Montreal, QC - Studio TD ^
01/21/25 - Toronto, ON - Concert Hall ^
01/23/25 - Detroit, MI - El Club ^
01/24/25 - Chicago, IL - The Vic ^
01/25/25 - Minneapolis, MN - Fine Line ^
01/28/25 - Denver, CO - Summit ^
01/31/25 - Vancouver, BC - Hollywood Theater ^
02/01/25 - Seattle, WA - The Showbox ^
02/02/25 - Portland, OR - Wonder Ballroom ^
02/04/25 - San Francisco, CA - The Fillmore ^
02/05/25 - Santa Cruz, CA - The Catalyst
02/06/25 - Los Angeles, CA - The Wiltern ^
02/07/25 - Las Vegas NV - The Wall
02/08/25 - Phoenix, AZ - Valley Bar
02/10/25 - Houston, TX - WOMH
02/11/25 - Austin, TX - Mohawk
02/12/25 - Dallas, TX - Club Dada
02/14/25 - Nashville, TN - Drkmttr
02/15/25 - Atlanta, GA - Vinyl
02/16/25 - Boone, NC - Lily's Snack Bar
02/17/25 - Durham, NC - Pinhook
02/18/25 - Baltimore, MD - Metro Gallery
02/19/25 - Troy, NY - No Fun
03/11/25 - Ghent, BE - Trefpunt
03/12/25 - Paris, FR - La Point Ephemere
03/13/25 - Belfort, FR - La Poudrière
03/14/25 - Milan, IT - Arci Bellezza
03/15/25 - Bologna, IT - Covo Club
03/17/25 - Vienna, AT - Flucc Deck
03/18/25 - Prague, CZ - Café V lese
03/19/25 - Berlin, DE - Urban Spree
03/21/25 - Copenhagen, DK - Vega Ideal bar
03/22/25 - Hamburg, DE - Nochtwache
03/23/25 - Rotterdam, NL - V11
03/24/25 - Amsterdam, NL - Tolhuistuin
03/26/25 - London, UK - The Garage
03/27/25 - Leeds, UK - The Attic
03/28/25 - Glasgow, UK - Stereo
03/29/25 - Salford, UK - The White Hotel
03/30/25 - Sheffield, UK - Delicious Clam
03/31/25 - Bristol, UK - Strange Brew
04/01/25 - Cardiff, UK - Club Ifor Bach
04/02/25 - Brighton, UK - Komedia
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 a month away from recording the follow-up to a cultishly adored album.
“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.
Photo credit: Shervin Lainez
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