Thou’s punishment ritual

Back in the day, when Thou had a problem with a crowd, they’d play pain sets. “We’d come out and play all of our longest, slowest songs to punish the audience,” guitarist Andy Gibbs remembers. These 10-minute-plus tracks — centerpieces of every full-length Thou album up until their newest one, Umbilical — are depraved, post-doom documents of eternal suffering, channeling the flow of the band’s roiling anger into an even more sinister ooze.

There have been no pain sets lately. In the beginning, Louisiana’s heaviest band in a generation — founded by Gibbs, fellow guitarist Matthew Thudium, bassist Mitch Wells, and drummer Terry Gulino in 2005 and joined by frontman Bryan Funck two years later — were forced to split bills with bands they disdained. Sharing the stage with the sloppy, arrogant, ignorant posers who turned Funck off metal in high school, they’d perform for bored, dead-eyed crowds uninterested in their challenging work. 19 years later, they can play with whomever they want.

Funck strikes a frightening figure on stage. In Thou’s pain-set days, he used to berate bored concertgoers for not moving enough. Now that he’s become the primary object of interest at most every show he plays, he prefers not to interact at all. “I’m not a performer,” he tells me. “I’m not up there to do a little dance for people or be a thing for them to look at. When people are too attentive to everything I’m doing, it feels like I’m acting in a play. I have to just ignore the crowd if that starts happening.”

On an early June night at the Zeitgeist — a New Orleans theater and film institution since 1986, operating out of Arabi since 2019 — Thou play a pulverizing set, ripping through Umbilical with relish in front of an enthusiastic audience of friends and diehard fans. Tyler Coburn — the group’s drummer since 2018 — blasts his way under some of the fastest songs the band has ever recorded; the three-headed monster of Wells, Gibbs, and Thudium lock into tightly chaotic grooves; Funck paces the stage, whisper-screams into the mic, wraps the cord around his neck, and assumes menacing, petrified poses, never once addressing the unwashed masses moshing at his feet.

Behind the counter at Sisters in Christ — the record shop he’s run out of a storefront on Magazine and Dufossat Streets for the past eight years — Funck is laid back and almost friendly. The slim, 44-year-old punk is in recovery mode, 44 hours after the Zeitgeist release show.

“I’m a little roughed up,” he tells me, surrounded by vinyl, comics, and other curiosities. “I’m getting older and my voice is super out of shape. We don’t practice as much as I’d like to.”

Funck famously entered Thou by force, emailing Gibbs a mutinous proposal to kick Thudium — then the group’s lead vocalist — out of the band to make room for his own obliterating voice (and ego). Part of the idea, he says, was to add a group he liked to the thinning roster of heavy local outfits he could book at his Banks Street warehouse home; joining was just a bonus.

It was an easier sell than one might imagine: Funck’s reputation as New Orleans’ most dedicated and prolific punk purveyor preceded him. And Thudium, a guitarist at heart, was happy to hand off his vocal responsibilities to a more enthusiastic party.

In the roughly two years between the band’s official formation in Baton Rouge and Funck’s 2007 arrival, they took what gigs they could, playing with jam bands at a local steakhouse before they began hosting their own shows at Wells’s house — his father remains their biggest fan. These rites of passage are expected for emerging bands, but Funck raised the stakes, spreading the group’s sphere of influence 80 miles east on the I-10.

Along with his considerable rolodex, prodigious pen, and nightmarish delivery, Funck brought with him the singular visual aesthetic the band had been missing: Versions of their first four album covers — for Tyrant, Peasant, Summit, and Heathen — are striking woodcut illustrations of a bearded man, displayed respectively as a king, a serf, a Christ figure, and a sinner cringing in the face of God’s wrath.

The same artistic integrity and attention to detail can be found in the band’s other merch and promotional material. An old-school booker through and through, Funck speeds headlong into a tangent during our first interview on the laziness of local promoters. “People wanna white glove it,” he tells me. “That’s why all these shows happen in clubs; they just wanna show up and look cool. I mean, dude, most of them don’t even make flyers!”

At that moment, we’re discussing another of Funck’s many pet peeves: the lack of all-ages shows in New Orleans due to a perceived dearth of all-ages venues. Back in Funck’s salad days, he maintained a commitment to never booking 18- or 21-plus spaces. It’s a tenet of the hardcore, anarchist (straight-edge, vegan) punk community he came up in, and one he holds dear. His radicalizing moment, however, was not what you’d expect.

“I was supposed to go see Weezer when they were touring the blue record,” he says. “They were gonna play at UNO [Lakefront Arena], but they didn’t sell enough tickets, and the show got moved to [longstanding uptown club] Tipitina’s. I was 16 at the time, so I couldn’t get in. That always stuck in my craw.”

When he started booking shows of his own, he was “real militant” about never excluding anyone on the basis of age, even if it took a little extra work to find venues that would accommodate minors, and about maxing out ticket prices at $5, a policy he stuck to from 1999 through at least 2015, he says. Despite his shift in focus to keeping Sisters in Christ’s doors open in recent years, entry to Thou’s Umbilical release show marked a return to that price point.

Being in a band is another kind of compromise. For Funck, Thou was a reaction to the sloppiness of their Louisiana sludge metal forebears — the unholy trinity of Eyehategod, Acid Bath, and Crowbar, to whom they continue to be compared, much to his dismay. At heart, he was still a ’90s punk, more aligned with Misfits, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains than anyone from his home state.

The original members — Wells and Gibbs, at least — had a less confrontational perspective but still felt the need to fill a hole: an extreme, heavy band divorced from the scene’s endemic machismo, artless aggression, and ignorance; a slower, more melodic sound, closer to post-rock or stoner metal than most Gulf Coast fare. “I wanted it to be, for lack of a better word, emotional,” Gibbs says, describing the early music he wrote for Thou. “I wanted it to have feeling, and I wanted it to be slow enough that you could digest feelings from it.”

“I was just along for the ride at that point,” Wells admits. He remembers almost getting booted from the band for missing practices and bringing his reluctant girlfriend to the ones he did attend.

Ultimately, they met somewhere in the middle. In the 17 years since Funck joined, they’ve released six studio LPs and four full-length collaborations with other artists, with two dozen-odd splits, EPs, and seven-inch singles filling the gaps between their longer releases. None of this would have been possible without compromise, but compromise comes at a cost.

Funck wrote the lyrics to Umbilical from the perspective of an earlier version of himself: the 18-year-old DIY-or-die idealogue who would have scoffed at the many compromises and concessions he’s made, both as a member of Thou and as a single human entity, to become who he is today — an aging record store owner with $50 in the bank, by his own account, but also the face of a band whose legacy will live on long after he rasps his last words.

Perhaps in deference to this monomaniacal ghost of Funck past, Umbilical sounds more like hardcore than anything else in Thou’s catalog. You won’t find any signs of deference in the instrumentals, though. There’s no compromise in the thrashing white knucklers, led by Coburn’s breakneck drumming — “House of Ideas,” “I Feel Nothing When You Cry,” and “Unbidden Guest,” — that bisect the album, tracks that wouldn’t feel entirely alien on a Bad Brains record. Neither are their vocal half measures on “Narcissist’s Prayer” nor “I Return as Chained and Bound to You,” slow-churning meat grinders that, despite their relatively meager run times could easily find a home in the most malevolent of pain sets. “Pain has been a huge part of our journey,” Gibbs reflects, “but this is the first time we’ve inflicted it on ourselves.”

Thou’s self-flagellation ritual begins in Umbilical’s opening moments. “Can you hear the cries of worn out phrases from listless gazes, pretentious lingering in childish phases, the heartless hand and empty gestures, the pitiful searching for hollow pleasures,” Funck howls on “Narcissist’s Prayer,” as the song’s battering, repetitive main riff gains slow momentum. “Lost in empty dialectics, the art of building up and tearing down, of discussing all things and accomplishing nothing. Of compromised ideals, friendships abandoned, our works substandard, our principles meandering. So speak our names as a warning, as a curse, as a failure. At last, it’s time to die.”

Seeing these lines laid out on paper, one would imagine Funck and his band’s infractions to be worthy of a fate worse than hell. When pressed to name them, though, he mainly cites minor digressions from his core beliefs — occasionally performing in 18-plus clubs, sharing bills with bands whose values don’t align with his own — the type of lapses that come with the territory of going about one’s life.

The only major, publicized demerit on Thou’s hardcore report card is their performance at Scion Rock Fest 2010 (sponsored by the car company), a foul so flagrant it caused the editors at Maximum Rocknroll — punk’s reining broadsheet for nearly 40 years until its 2019 dissolution — to put the band on a list of sellouts, and for Antigravity Magazine editor Dan Fox to corner them into an awkward, on-record exchange.

Wells remains dismissive of the controversy surrounding their appearance at the festival, calling it a means to an end — the end being the acquisition of funds to bring Nottingham doom metal deities Moloch stateside. But Gibbs remembers losing sleep over the decision to effectively help a corporation gain a modicum of punk credibility, and Funck, true to form, says he agrees with MRR’s assessment.

“If you’re in a band that has any level of ambition, you’re setting yourself up for having to compromise,” Gibbs says. “It’s an inherently compromising position to be a band that puts out albums for consumption. We’ve definitely made compromises.”

“I was thinking about suggesting we talk ourselves off Spotify,” Wells says. “We should have that convo at some point.”

“Probably during an interview,” Gibbs responds.

Even Funck acknowledges that some of the ideals he held in such esteem as a young punk don’t align with the way things work in the real world. “As a 44-year-old man, I would stand by most of what we’ve done as a band,” he says. “But in terms of how we’ve treated one another, those are the places where I’m a bit less sympathetic to us not reaching a higher standard.”

This standard, he claims, is not one to which he’d hold the general population, though he can’t help but disparage those who enter the culture industry in search of a payday as hucksters and frauds. Umbilical, he says, is about “striving to be better and get closer to how I want it to be, rather than how we’ve felt like it needed to be in order to continue.

“You do things a certain way because you’re lazy or you’re aggravated or you’re stressed out or whatever,” he goes on. “To me, that’s not a good enough excuse.”

Funck’s meta album process begins with the construction of an opening salvo and a closing statement. The rest of the world is built between these two poles. But since Thou is a band built on consensus — though not an anarchist band, he clarifies — he can’t impose his preferred narrative arc on a record without sign-offs from the rest of the group. In conversations surrounding the sequencing Umbilical, he fought with Gibbs about opening with “Narcissist’s Prayer.”

In Gibbs’s eyes, kicking things off with such a classic Thou cut — slow and hard and heavy in all the usual places — was a cheap fake-out, hiding the fundamental differences between this project and their previous ones. He ultimately came around, in part because of the elegant symmetry of pairing the track with the album’s equally slow, equally punishing closer, “Siege Perilous.”

“It’s an interesting way of putting it,” he tells me, though he generally disagrees with my characterization of the song. “In times of writer’s block, when I’m not feeling up for writing brutal and punishing music, forcing myself into that zone is almost a form of Catholic self-discipline. The riffs on ‘Siege Perilous’ are just us flogging ourselves.”

“You can’t reward some people without punishing others,” Wells jokes.

The symmetry between “Narcissist’s Prayer” and “Siege Perilous” is there in Funck’s lyrics, too, as is his and Gibbs’s mutual desire to purge their sins through suffering. “Life used to be so hard, now everything is easy,” he shouts, his voice rising from a pissed growl to a feverish scream. “Turn back the page with my friend, with my friend from so far away. We’ve seen how love can grow, now we see how it dies. Peace has finally come upon me, and it leaves me weak.” By the album’s unforgiving logic, Thou’s acclaim and the scarce creature comforts they’ve accumulated by virtue of their limited success are evidence of spiritual necrosis.

“Arise from our deathbed,” Funck roars as the song barrels to a close, rousing himself from his cowardly slumber. “Return to life just to walk away. And I’m not coming back.”