THUMPER: "Despite this album sounding darker, it feels warm and positive"

Most of us are sick of talking about Covid. Still, while we refrain from mentioning the war, behavioural leftovers still linger. Contactless payments. The odd facemask on a bus. Anti-vax mums with measled kids.

The pandemic also gave us a new Thumper. The six-piece exploded into life in 2019, armed with two drummers, four guitarists, and a penchant for loud shows. Playing gigs allowed them to road-test tracks for their 2022 debut Delusions Of Grandeur, which, as the title suggests, was a fuzzed-up feast of irresistible jams and biting lyricism.

Without the crowds, there was no live litmus test. Throw in some personal struggles, and the unavoidable trundle of getting older, and the result is their second album, Sleeping With The Light On: a dark acknowledgement of the “paranoid energy that was beginning to form in the band.”

“It’s like any element of art; your taste shifts as you get older,” says singer Oisín Leahy Furlong. “I’m not saying humour is exclusively the purview of youth. But I think, especially in the early days, the purpose was to sweat and get crazy, and the music was part of that.

“As I continued down this path, I realised this is taking up so much of my life, and then your actual life starts bleeding into the music. You also want an escape from life, and you want it all to mean something. It becomes less fickle, less tongue-in-cheek. It’s difficult and necessary. The whole thing is a big balancing act.”

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A balancing act is a decent metaphor for the band as a whole: six personalities, each with their own jobs, schedules and musical projects (including Leahy Furlong’s solo venture Anamoe Drive).

“At any given time, one of us in the band was having a full-blown mental breakdown and the other five members would carry them kicking and screaming through this album,” Leahy Furlong says. “I say isolation is the theme on the album, but maybe it’s togetherness. I don’t know.

GLIMMER OF HOPE

“The title alludes to fear and a sort of isolation. But it’s also a reference to a glimmer of hope. You’re sleeping through life, but the lights are on.”

“It’s all those themes – the isolation and the burnout – but it’s about what happens after or around it,” adds guitarist and producer Alan Dooley. “For some reason, despite this album sounding darker, it feels warm and positive. A lot of people would think, ‘How the hell does that work? Is it not just a bunch of noise?’ If you’re thoughtful about it, it’s very beautiful and very thought-out and methodical. It’s only ever enhanced our music, having more members.”

Lockdown afforded Dooley the space to plant himself behind the desk, and while he’s modest in the interview, the word on the street is that he spent his share of late nights perfecting the production.

“It was the perfect opportunity to really get into the weeds of recording and producing and engineering for me,” he says. “I felt pretty confident going into the second album because of that. Covid prepped us to be more of a studio band, I guess, which would have happened for a lot of musicians, now that I think about it.”

The result is a riff-fest unlike anything coming out of Ireland at the moment, combining Thumper’s familiar, fast-paced appeal with newfound catchiness. It burrows in your brain; if the descending guitars and chorus of ‘Bad Mood’, the screaming refrain on ‘My New Blade’, or the Strokes-y, radio transmitter vocals on ‘The Drip’ don’t get stuck in your head, then you ought to look for a new temporal lobe.

Much of this is owed to the songs on Sleeping With The Light On being shorter than those on Thumper’s debut.

“I think one of the side effects of being nominated for the RTÉ Choice Awards was that we were subject to criticism by people who would not normally know or care about us, or maybe didn’t know what we were about,” Leahy Furlong says. “Our first album was called Delusions Of Grandeur; the clue is in the name.

“The length of it was very purposeful, but a lot of the criticism was like, ‘Oh, they don’t know how to write a short song.’ At first that was hard. We were used to people who liked us writing about us. We kicked against it, but then I thought about it and realised maybe this is an opportunity to put ourselves in a box and make things more concise.

“Songwriting has always been the most important thing to us. Everything else is pointless without the material. I said to the lads along the way that I wanted it to be a thing where every section of the song is somebody’s favourite. I wanted every bit of it to burst at the seams with something purposeful. Nothing is there that we really didn’t think about. Who knows, maybe the next record we do will be the opposite of that again.

“But for now, that’s just what interests us; we wanted to be more vacuum-packed and concise.”

So, musicians actually care about what us belletrists in the orts columns have to say?

INTERNAL COMPASS

“We’ve always had a pretty good sense of internal compass,” Leahy Furlong rebuts. “I think it would have started off not giving a fuck what people thought in a very youthful way: ‘We are going to have 10-minute feedback solos.’ That transitioned into wanting to create a space that’s just ours.

“We want to create a space that other people feel safe in. It’s inviting people in, but also being aware that not everybody is going to be into it. Just like in life, you have to play ahead with your own ideals. What else is there? The opposite would be to sit around and worry if what we’re doing isn’t valid or interesting enough.

“The longer you do this and the longer you make your own work, it doesn’t really come into it that often, really. Maybe afterwards, you think about how you’re perceived, but while you’re in it, you’re just in it and you can call it a ‘flow state’, or you can call it ‘confidence’.

“I think at this stage it’s fair to say we have created a ‘Thumper world’, a set of colours and shapes that are ours. We just operate on that ethos, and if you don’t like it, fair play, go listen to something else.”

If anything, making this album taught the band how to exist in uncertainty and chaos.

“This is a fucking journey, man,” Leahy Furlong concludes. “I think being comfortable with making and creating those experiments, even if you’ve no clue if they’re going to work out, is important. It’s all a continuum and you can only ever view it in the moment. It could mean something completely different in six months’ time.

“It’s about enjoying the music, the relationships, and the challenging elements too. These songs are just records of time. We’ll do this press, these gigs and we’ll move on, and be glad that we did it.”

• Sleeping With The Light On is out now. Thumper play the Academy, Dublin tonight, March 4.