Acclaimed Dublin alt-rockers THUMPER release sophomore album ‘Sleeping With The Light On‘. The band also announce a string of Ireland and UK dates in support of the release.
THUMPER have gone from playing small hometown shows to touring Ireland, UK and Europe extensively, as well as becoming regular features at Irish festivals, appearing at the likes of Electric Picnic, All Together Now, Indiependence, Other Voices, etc. The band feel right at home on festival stages around the continent too, having made appearances at big name European festivals such as Mad Cool (ESP), Reading & Leeds (UK), Iceland Airwaves (IS), Haldern Pop (DE), Rock For People (CZ), Eurosonic (NL), Reeperbahn (DE), United Artists Prague (CZ), and many more.
THUMPER – Album Overview – Sleeping With The Light On
A couple of weeks after finishing our first album Delusions of Grandeur, and months before it would be released, we found ourselves back in the rehearsal room writing again. Shortly into this process the pandemic hit and it had a profound effect on the songs that were being produced. The songs became darker, but also somehow more precise. Slowly the new album came into focus. We called it Sleeping With The Light On to acknowledge this darker, paranoid energy that was beginning to form in our band, but also that the making of the album itself was an effort to dispel that darkness, that there was light to be enjoyed – in time.
In previous years we would cobble together a tune, take it on tour, and gauge the impact of each section based on crowd reaction, but in this era of lockdowns that was no longer possible. In the stark confines of our rehearsal room we could no longer rely on sheer volume or catharsis to get a feeling across. Smashing up an amp or relentlessly stage diving is a good way to make a show memorable, but in the absence of this all we had was the music.
We decided that each moment of each song had to generate this catharsis all on its own merit, that each section could be a chorus to someone. On Delusions there were plenty of elongated sections that revelled in the hypnosis of repetition, but this time around we made a concerted effort to vacuum pack each song into something lean – and pump as much colour and intentionality into every corner as we could.
The first song we wrote was The Engine and immediately the change in tone was obvious to us. Based on a riff that Oisín wrote when he was 14, the song evolved into a desperate push and pull. As we banded together suddenly the tongue in cheek lyrical style of the first record seemed performative. This would slowly be replaced by something more visceral and inward, out of necessity. In time we would litter the artworks to our singles with the logo of an unblinking eye, symbolizing that there was nowhere to hide – these new songs would be intimate and unflinching.
As the pandemic continued on, and personal struggles flooded the studio without the catharsis of live shows, sometimes we wouldn’t even be on talking terms. Some songs that were brought to the table acted as meeting grounds for us to collaborate and be close – without the need for words. Songs like The Rip, Bad Mood and There Will Be Blood were originally intended for Oisín’s solo project Anamoe Drive – but were transformed as a point of communion between the band, eventually it was hard to imagine them any other way, and this creative success was a soother to what could otherwise fall into tension.
Middle Management is a song that we attempted to write and repeatedly scrapped for years. The first demo dates back to well before the first album, and there were probably 10 versions since then. During COVID, as we knuckled down with this new body of work, the song re-emerged and we very gradually hammered it into shape, condensing years of ideas into something cohesive.
The song itself is an outlier on the album. Every other song coming in at around the 4 minute mark, Middle Management is a clean 10 minutes long. The vocal hook “I thought that I could change, I thought that you could too” repeated into abstraction as it becomes unclear if the narrator has any intention of changing at all. In addition to the walls of guitars, vocal harmonies and propulsive kraut rock drums, the song also features co-producer Rian Trench on Synth and Piano – the first time a THUMPER song has featured anyone other than the six core members.
By the time we brought the songs to the studio it was the most prepared we had ever been, and this conversely allowed us to be more playful and experimental as we knew every second of each song like the back of our hands. We converted a house in the wilds of Co. Donegal into a studio and recorded all day, everyday, without the distraction of phone signal, wifi or the outer world.
The drums were tracked in a huge live room in Attica Studio on the other side of Donegal – a dream for us as many of our favourite albums had been recorded there (namely the first two Villagers albums).
We took these sessions back to Dublin where Alan became sole producer, fawning over each detail, rerecording anything that sounded too influenced by the stout that fuelled the northern sessions, and generally pulling together our vision of this new era of THUMPER.
A labour of love, and a document of a band growing into themselves in real time, Sleeping With The Light On contains the high highs and low lows of putting all of yourself into a record.