Album review: Thrice – Horizons/West

Over the course of their 26-year career, Thrice’s musical style has changed more drastically than Davey Havok’s haircuts. Despite this, the band have never forsaken quality for aesthetics. Surprising as their aesthetic evolutions have sometimes been, each shift has always felt intentional, a deliberate conjuring of specific atmosphere and sound that makes sense in the overall arch of the band’s expansive narrative arc.

Horizons/West is the band’s 12th album, and the counterpart to 2021’s Horizons/East. Though dark and moody in places, that record ended with a flourish of hope – a smattering of sunlight shining across a scorched Earth in the form of closer Unitive/East. If you thought that meant Horizons/West would start in a similar emotional place, you’re sorely mistaken. Though it is a sequel to its predecessor, it’s also, as the title suggests, its opposite.

As such, opener Blackout elicits a darkness, creeping like a storm cloud over the hope of that last album’s last song. There is some hope in the lyrics, but the music negates it all. Gnash is equally bleak, all glitchy aggression and dark disposition. Of course, this being Thrice, as soon as you think you know what this album is about, it surprises you. The bass-laden Albatross is a grungy rock-pop anthem, while Undertow and the appropriately bleak The Dark Glow, thanks to the electronic stutters underpinning them, sound more in line with latter-day Radiohead.

Elsewhere, Distant Suns is caught halfway between dream and nightmare, its insistent drumbeat and unsettling melody the sound of panicked night terrors, while Vesper Light – on which Dustin Kensrue at times adopts a not-unlike Thom Yorke falsetto – is an anti-apocalyptic burst of fatalistic and defiant post-hardcore that fades into album closer Unitive/West, which itself sounds like the world finally dying.

It’s a powerful end to an ambitious, thoughtfully-crafted record, even if, overall, it doesn’t quite reach the heights of which Thrice have, over the decades, shown themselves to be capable.

Verdict: 3/5

For fans of: Manchester Orchestra, Alexisonfire, Thursday

Horizons/West is released on October 3 via Epitaph