Thou have always reveled in misanthropy. Onstage, the band might antagonize a disengaged audience by taunting them, or turning around and ignoring them. In lyric sheets, they paint humankind as a failed endeavor, once full of potential for good but chronically unable to pry itself from pitfalls as old as civilization itself. This outright disdain is one of the few things that Thou will cop to sharing with the Louisiana sludge-metal forebears, like Eyehategod and Crowbar, to whom they’re frequently compared.
Despite obvious similarities in geography, aggression, the lacerating use of guitar feedback, and a stylistic blend of doom metal’s murk and hardcore’s nastiness, Thou have never accepted the sludge mantle. Vocalist Bryan Funck has repeatedly suggested a closer kinship to another decades-old regional scene: Seattle grunge. Thou have amassed a staggering repertoire of grunge covers over the years, and it’s clear that their affinity goes beyond a cheeky fondness for Nirvana. Nevertheless, the band’s own abrasive, atypical, and often meandering compositions can make Funck’s determination to keep sludge at arm’s length seem a little precious. Not even the Melvins at their heaviest have ever sounded a fraction as ugly.
But on Umbilical, Thou make their grunge lineage more explicit while maintaining the intensity of their all-encompassing contempt. “Essentially, it’s a diss record,” Funck said of the album in a recent interview. “But I’m dissing Thou.” He turns the magnifying glass on himself, interrogating the anarcho-DIY ethos he’s held since adolescence against the backdrop of the compromises that Thou have made to further their careers. “Everything you’ve ever done, everything you’ve ever said, everything you’ve ever felt is a dagger on my belt,” he shrieks on “Emotional Terrorist,” before flipping his perspective: “Everything I’ve ever done, everything I’ve ever said, everything I’ve ever felt is a chain around my neck.”
It might seem like this insistent self-loathing calls for Thou’s most gnarled music yet, but instead we get the band at its most streamlined. This is their first album (excepting collaborations) with no tracks over seven minutes, and none of the brief interludes that the band is fond of. Everything is a song, and most of these songs even abide by something close to standard pop structure. Umbilical is no less heavy than any other Thou album—it might be their heaviest yet—but it no longer requires mental gymnastics to call this music grunge. Maybe it’s Alice in Chains starring in The Crow: murdered by a gang and resurrected in ghastlier form to seek vengeance. Maybe it’s Nirvana after Cobain makes a deal with the Devil, surviving the ’90s but cursed to make progressively more fucked-up albums (Umbilical is perhaps two or three iterations past In Utero).
Lead single “I Feel Nothing When You Cry” blusters in with uncharacteristically busy drumming from Tyler Coburn and thick, humid fumes rising from Andrew Gibbs’ and Matthew Thudium’s guitar amps. It sounds like 12 people queuing up “Geek U.S.A.,” all pressing play at once, and feeding the results through a wall of mangled speakers. Umbilical is a faster, hookier version of Thou, more prone to impish check this out feats—like building up to a breaking point in the middle of “I Feel Nothing When You Cry,” stopping on a dime, then shifting the groove and melody ever so slightly—than grimacing I dare you to survive this flagellation. This playfulness extends to lyrical references in unlikely places. The outwardly despondent “I Return as Chained and Bound to You” takes its closing refrain from a Mighty Boosh sketch; on “House of Ideas,” Funck slips in the central line of Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” right before a crushing breakdown.
Where previous Thou albums gestured at alt-rock tropes with a sense of remove, Umbilical leaves more connective tissue intact. The 2018 Rhea Sylvia EP and 2020’s full-length collaboration with Emma Ruth Rundle, May Our Chambers Be Full, feel like clear predecessors, but their gothic overtones and/or devotion to slower tempos ensured different results than Umbilical’s pulse-quickening anthems. Low-slung, Cantrellian riffs like those on “The Promise” aren’t alien territory for Thou, but the fact that they’re delivered at 120 BPM alongside a hummable vocal hook is a welcome surprise.
For all of Thou’s provocation, experimentation, and obfuscation, it’s not like they’ve ever been a difficult band to enjoy. Maybe their most accurate grunge analog is Pearl Jam, whose refusal to play by the rules outlined by MTV and Ticketmaster belied their identity as one of the poppiest, most earnest bands of the genre’s first wave. Thou are a blast even when Funck is digging into esoteric philosophy over the slowest riff you’ve ever heard, but it’s refreshing to hear them get real with themselves, jogging their music out of the enthralling but insular world they’ve created over the past 15-plus years. No one is ever going to accuse Thou of selling out. They’ve put in the work; they deserve to have some fun.
