Thursday.

Yesterday, the band Thursday announced that after their upcoming American and Australian tours they will no longer be a band. Now, bands split up all the time. Every day someone, somewhere, must hear the news that one of their favourite groups of musicians is going to cease to be. But it isn’t every day that a band as important and downright good as Thursday split up, so please forgive me if I go a little bleary eyed on you all.

In 1997, when I was six years old, Geoff Rickly, Tom Keeley, Bill Henderson, Tim Payne and Tucker Rule formed Thursday in the city of New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1998 they played their first show, alongside Saves the Day, Midtown and Poison The Well. In 1999 they released the debut album Waiting (which was one of the first records I wrote about when I first started this blog).

If you are a bit older than me or a massive music nerd you might have figured out that those dates place Thursday as being part of the emo/post-hardcore scene that in the New York and New Jersey area that, in an astonishingly short time frame in the late nineties and early noughties produced some purely amazing bands. Brand New, Glassjaw, Midtown, Saves the Day and Taking Back Sunday are but a few of the bands that came shooting out of the scene while other bands such as Thrice and Poison The Well (neither of them from the New York/Jersey area) were brought into the spotlight on the back of it.

Thursday were (and until the end of their Australian tour are) one of the few bands from that era that has not only stayed together (albeit with the departure of Henderson) but have also continued to produce music of the highest quality. They have grown and developed without alienating portions of their fan base (unlike Brand New, who let’s be honest, have pissed off a lot of people with their new direction) and kept plugging away even though they have never received the widespread recognition they deserve.

Take Thrice for example. As mentioned above the Californian band emerged at roughly the same time as Thursday and they have, broadly speaking, a fairly similar sound. Like Thursday they have worked hard, putting out seven albums since 1998 and have, more crucially, kept putting out good albums. This year’s Major/Minor has had critics fawning over it like nobody’s business. Unlike Thursday they have had much wider recognition and full on major label support. I’m not intending this as a slight towards them (because I love Thrice) but Thursday as a band deserve as much as Thrice, but for whatever reason never quite got it (ironically, Thrice have this year gone on hiatus).

Still, they have left us with some amazing records. Waiting and Full Collapse are both masterpieces, the kind of albums that not only make people fall in love with a band, but make them fall in love with the idea of being in a band. It doesn’t stop there, Kill The House Lights (with its iconic dove logo) is a textbook example of distortion and angst that a few bands could do with taking note of while Common Existence saw them take on a larger, more expansive sound without losing anything that had made them so good in the first place. In fact, every record has its own merits and they’re all worth owning, hardcore fan or not.

The statement announcing the bands split hinted at the possibility of collaboration between some of the bands members in the future. But somehow I can’t imagine Thursday being the kind of band who are going to ever fully go back on breaking up. Reunion shows one day down the line? Perhaps. But in the long run the band that was so good for so long is dead and buried. At least we have something good to remember them by.

Patch.