There will always be a segment of a popular punk band’s fanbase maintaining their debut will never be topped, based on its "rawness" and "honesty." For Thursday, this cohort appears to be smaller than most. In fact, the overwhelming consensus is that Waiting is their least potent work, an opinion that’s less uncomfortable to hold knowing that it is also Geoff Rickly’s. But that’s more a reflection on the overall strength of their catalog and how every Thursday record managed to be superlative in its own way: Full Collapse is the most influential; War All the Time the heaviest; A City by the Light Divided remains their most melodic, A Common Existence their most brutal; and No Devolución their most comprehensive. Waiting simply stands as Thursday’s most promising and earnest album.
These are qualities that are granted retroactively, and the slick packaging of this reissue (including their now-iconic dove logo, which didn't actually appear until War All the Time) realigns Waiting as part of Thursday’s arc rather than an outlier. While it’s easy to appreciate because of what it led to, Waiting managed to stand out at the time because of Rickly’s passionate, verbose lyrics and near-frightening intensity. This was by far the most developed aspect of Thursday’s sound in 2000 and would continue to set them apart even as a still-healthy record industry figured out what the hell to do with them.
At the time of Waiting, Thursday didn’t quite know where they stood either. The music itself is agitated, propulsive. "Porcelain" was inspired by the suicide of a friend and begins the record expounding on the heartbreaking fragility of life itself, contrasted with Rickly’s anger and resentment towards a society unwilling to take the smallest steps to protect those who might not be able to help themselves. Rickly also advocated for ramped-up suicide prevention measures and tighter background checks for gun buyers in the lyrics sheet.
The same overwhelming frustration courses through "Dying in New Brunswick", perhaps the most tortured track Rickly would ever write. As with most of Waiting, it’s drawn from his own experience—his girlfriend at the time moved to the titular city and was raped within a week. Rickly tries to understand her trauma ("In these city streets I hide my face/ I turn away when you look at me/ And every night when I try to sleep/ I can feel your hands all over my body") as well as cultural mores and legal hurdles that causes the victim to blame themselves ("They say it doesn’t happen that often/ But it’s happening right now"). The only thing the two songs share is a longing for escape, from the city, from everything—death is preferable to the liminal state of dying.
It’s extremely bleak stuff, to the point where a song called "Ian Curtis" is one of the least harrowing. Like many, I arrived at Waiting only after discovering Full Collapse*,* and I heard the chorus of "Ian Curtis" as a prescient barb at the Joy Division worshippers that would overrun neighboring New York City years later: "I heard Ian Curtis hang himself again in your band." As it turns out, it’s "in your bed", and the scene is actually of Rickly and an ex listening to Joy Division in bed together. Given this rueful context, as well as that of "Porcelain", the image reflects on the absurdity of romanticizing suicide. "Ian Curtis" is followed by an instrumental called "Introduction"; who wouldn’t want a breather and restart after all of this?
Such is the urgency of Waiting, with Rickly so inspired to just get this weight off him that the band didn’t have time to really figure out what to do besides push. Occasionally, you can hear the sheared, trebly guitars of Texas Is the Reason (whose Norm Brannon heads up Collect Records with Rickly), Fugazi’s more ruminative moments, or Sunny Day Real Estate’s yearning, exploratory passages. Thursday had too much of a melodic underpinning for "screamo" or even "post-hardcore" to really stick, but they had yet to figure out how much to commit to pop. On "Porcelain", Rickly can barely catch his breath chasing its cyclical melody, unable to fully give the chorus the boost it needs; by Full Collapse, they’d learn to explode on "Understanding in a Car Crash" and "Standing on the Edge of Summer". At times, it’s the sound of a band throwing songs together rather than crafting them: On "In Transmission" the dissonance between Rickly’s melodies and the lead guitar unintentionally serve its central metaphor of communication breakdowns. There are strong moments, but everything that Waiting did well, Full Collapse did better.
But the same could be said of Full Collapse in relation to Thursday’s future works. In fact, Waiting gives hints of how they’d progress even beyond their commercial breakthrough. The violins are a nice touch on "This Side of Brightness", but they’re just a touch; on No Devolución’s "Magnets Caught in a Metal Heart", Thursday knew how to be orchestral. The social conscience that started to emerge on "The Circle Ends" would be fully explored on War All the Time and A Common Existence. And then there’s the last song they ever recorded, "Stay True"—Rickly’s addressing an up-and-coming punk rock band and giving advice on what it’s like to be young, ambitious, idealistic, thin-skinned and prone to relying on outside validation. It never sounded patronizing or condescending; anyone who’s heard Waiting knows that Rickly and Thursday have been in that same position.
