This review is part of a series looking back at significant albums on their anniversaries. Through the benefit of hindsight we will be viewing the album not just as it was released, but how it stands the test of time, as well as its place in the band’s discography and the genre in general.
Victory Records – 10 April 2001
Time Can’t Let This Pass
When I saw that Thursday’s second album Full Collapse was coming up on its 25th anniversary, my first reaction was surprisingly indifferent. I mean, I loved the record when it first came out. Like, really loved it. I admit, there’s a pretty big difference between teenage me and me at damn-near mid-forties… my love of this record, though… well that has remained constant.
Thursday also wasn’t new to me in 2001. I’d already seen them a handful of times around New Jersey and had their 1999 Waiting EP on Eyeball Records spinning for well over a year. They were already part of the local soundtrack, one of those bands that felt like they belonged to the scene. But when Full Collapse arrived, something shifted. Revisiting the album now, I realized Thursday may have been the catalyst behind a change in how I processed music… and emotions in general.
In 2001 most of us were crammed into basements and VFW halls, burning mix CDs and driving across New Jersey for shows with barely enough gas money to get home. Life felt smaller then, simpler in ways that are hard to explain in a post 9-11, post COVID, post Trump world. Looking back from the middle of whatever chaotic mess the present day has become, that era feels almost impossibly distant.
Thursday did something no other band had done to me before. It gave me an outlet I didn’t know I needed. Sure, I’d been listening to The Smiths for years, but I always classified Morrissey and company as crybaby music… a guilty pleasure you didn’t openly admit to in a room full of hardcore kids. Full Collapse came along and slapped me across the face with a whole new level of emotional honesty. The album unlocked a level of empathy I didn’t even know I had the capacity to experience.
This is Thursday at their best. Geoff Rickley’s near-psych-dissertation lyrics explore pain, loss, gentrification and a hundred other ideas I’d never really considered growing up in my podunk, vanilla town. Musically the band provides the perfect counterweight: screeching guitars, shotgun drumming and basslines that feel like they’re barely holding the whole thing together.
When “A0001” gives way to the gun-cocking crack of Tucker Rule’s drums kicking off “Understanding in a Car Crash,” it still feels like an aural epiphany. In that moment the band sounded both familiar and completely unorthodox, a combination that helped cement their legacy almost instantly.
The real anchor of Full Collapse, though, has always been Rickley’s lyrics. Every Thursday fan I know connects parts of this record to their own experiences, which makes it feel strangely timeless.
I distinctly remember seeing Thursday play “Paris in Flames” before the album came out and hearing them explain that it was inspired by the documentary Paris Is Burning and New York’s drag scene. I knew that when I bought the record… and still somehow convinced myself the song was speaking directly to cis-hetero, angsty teenage me. It probably wasn’t the first time I bent lyrics into my own self-serving interpretation, but it was the first time I realized I was doing it.
Full Collapse changed me, and I have to assume it did the same for a lot of others. The album came out about a year before my grandmother passed away, and having “Standing on the Edge of Summer” to fall back on helped me process emotions I didn’t yet have the language for.
Twenty-five years later, the influence of Full Collapse is impossible to ignore. You can hear pieces of it scattered across entire waves of post-hardcore, emo and alternative bands that followed. More importantly, you can still feel it in crowded rooms when those opening drum hits land and a new generation screams the words back just as loudly as we did the first time around. Some records capture a moment. Full Collapse helped shape the next quarter century of them.
Bad Dad (occasionally called Ed) has been on the periphery of the punk and punk-adjacent scene for over twenty years. While many contributors to this site have musical experience and talent, Ed’s musical claim to fame comes from his time in arguably the most punk rock Blockbuster Video district in NJ where he worked alongside members of Blanks 77, Best Hit TV and Brian Fallon. He is more than just an awful father to his 2 daughters, he is also a dreadful husband, a subpar writer, a terrible dresser and has a severe deficiency in all things talent… but hey, at least he’s self-aware, amirite?
Check out the pathetic attempts at photography on his insta at https://www.instagram.com/bad_dad_photography/