SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: THRICE – HORIZONS/WEST

THRICE
HORIZONS/WEST
EPITAPH RECORDS

Life is all about risk. Sometimes we have to take those risks to explore where the impossible can lead. For Thrice, making the direct sequel Horizons/West was long in the making before Horizons/East reached its completion. Now, Thrice continues where East left off, while inventively shaping an identity and mood that not only contradicts the first but creates a way back to the band’s hardcore roots.

From the outset, Horizons/West paints a picture of a darker, more atmospheric, and unsettling experience than their previous record. Opening with “Blackout,” “Gnash,” and “Albatross,” Thrice creates an ominous yet cinematically rich sonic storm from electronic-tinged aggression and horns in “Blackout” to its effortless alternating between grunge-infused textures, ethereal post-rock elements, and agitated hardcore soundscapes in “Gnash” and “Albatross,” Thrice creates a world of contrasts fitting of Horizons/West’s themes that feel both deliberate and brooding in its energies.

Thrice continues to utilize this concept of contrasts within the seedy electronic underbelly of “Undertow,” and the lethargic, dreamy elements that coincide with the hard-hitting energies of “Holding On,” then to a vast electronic soundscape of hopelessness and emptiness in the interlude “Dusk” before continuing to let the record live in this tenebrous universe in “The Dark Glow.” Outside of the artful musical contrasts that exist in Horizons/West, lyrically is where Thrice’s bread and butter lives, delivering alongside these blackened textures a story of parsing reality under the present-day battles with identity, social influence, fear, and an algorithmic chaos that has put the world in a state of fear and anxiety. Horizons/West is not just a philosophical tale of suffering from the echoes of technology and social media; it also provides a musical conceptual spine to keep listeners invested in its experience.

Where Horizons/East often lent itself to a sense of light and premeditated hope from the chaos, Horizons/West quickly and deliberately continues to dim that light throughout the last remaining tracks, “Crooked Shadows” to its deeply ornate finale, “Unitive/West.”  By further embracing the existence of shadow and aggressive confrontation, Thrice succeeds in creating a physical and internal separation between the albums. East and West are meant to be polar opposites, and Thrice effectively makes that distinction with Horizons/West.

From start to finish, Horizons/West has done a phenomenal job of creating a more mature, tighter record in terms of philosophical focus on the technical and social malaise that exists within the world and frames it as this sort of corrective lens, pulling back the golden vesper-like idealism of technological and social advancement and from a perceptive lens unfolds a sick, ugly, twisted world that each of these things have shaped. For all of these reasons and more, Thrice has created another successful record in their careers, showing reinvention of their post-hardcore roots and electronic experimentation.

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