Things are heating up for Thornhill vocalist Jacob Charlton.
It’s the early morning in Melbourne, Australia, and the group’s vocalist-guitarist has just returned from scouting video-shoot locations in his neighborhood for a forthcoming, to-be-detailed project. The sun’s been peeking out, and the weather’s starting to get glorious out there — though perhaps slower than he’d like.
“It’s coming out of winter in Melbourne right now, but it’s a struggle to get warm, sunny days, and that’s kind of what we’re after for this shoot,” he says regarding the mystery vid. “I just wanted to see at what time the sun hits this particular hill that we want to shoot on.”
While the band have been coming off plenty of praise over the nu-contorting sounds of their head-swirling, spring-released BODIES album — their third since founding in 2015 — Charlton hints that he and the rest of the act are hopping into the studio soon to track more new music. What’s more, the Aussie outfit — comprising Charlton, guitarist Ethan McCann, bassist Nick Sjogren and drummer Ben Maida — are also gearing up for their biggest tour ever, a supporting slot on Sleep Token’s insta-sold-out North American trek.
Thornhill have built themselves a sizeable fanbase over the years, which has put them in front of massive festival crowds Down Under and led to successful U.S. club tours, but the scale of the Sleep Token run is something Charlton and his bandmates have yet to experience.
To say the least, they’re excited to light up stages with BODIES’ blend of metalcore breakdowns, nu-grooving rhythms and pop-adjacent melodicism.
Speaking with Revolver, Charlton discusses the excitement of hopping on the Sleep Token trek, the blaring house parties he threw as a teenager, a dark-and-groovy recent rework of a Lady Gaga anthem and more.
We’re here to talk BODIES, but right now people are also fixating on your even more recent Lady Gaga cover for Triple J. How did that come about?
JACOB CHARLTON I have another side project called Vicious, which is just electronic stuff. I had a demo I was working on [with Thornhill’s Ethan McCann] — there was this breakdown-y synth part, and we liked it… [but] then we crashed out a bit on the whole thing, because there’s no way that we can play this live. Like, “How are we going to find all these synths?”
We kind of brought it back to basics, and Ethan made a demo that was more what we are, which was cool. We wanted it to feel like a Thornhill take [on “Paparazzi”]. It’s not like we did anything too crazy — we kept it pretty chill.
I’m surprised people love it as much as they [do], but I’m very thankful for it.
Why did you choose “Paparazzi” as the Gaga song to cover? And were you a little monster growing up?
Thornhill’s always been so big into the 2000s — like R&B and pop stuff. I used to have a lot of parties at my old house, everybody used to come through. It’d be very rare that you’d be putting on heavy music. My sister was such a prominent figure in my life, and we’d always be playing Rihanna and Lady Gaga as loud as possible at those sorts of parties.
Since you’d mentioned that you’d also taken a pass at “Paparazzi” with Vicious, how has the influence of pop music manifested itself differently between your two projects?
I think it’s forced me to be a more creative singer.
I’ve never been an incredible singer. I’ve never had incredible pitch, I’ve never been able to do the trills, and I can’t even sing like my girlfriend — she’s incredible, but she doesn’t sing [professionally]. She just has it, you know? That pop sound, [she’s] able to do the runs like that. I don’t have that ability.
I’ve always had to smooth my way to notes, and I’ve had to find my identity through that. So, for a lot of the Vicious stuff I wanted to push myself harder. I wanted to really work on my vocal chops to be able to… not even just be able to perform other people’s songs in the pop world, but to have the ability to actually come up with those ideas. I’ve been writing Vicious for three years, behind the scenes, and working really hard to find that side of [my] character.
I think that eventuated through BODIES as a record, as well, because it’s [got] different notes and different runs and different punctuation — [things that have] come through in ways that I haven’t had before [on earlier Thornhill projects].
The band have referred to BODIES’ “Tongues” as a song exploring your relationship with heavy music. Where did that heavy-music journey start, for you?
It’s funny, I wasn’t really into heavy music at the start. I didn’t have that, but I went into high school wanting to learn how to play the drums more than anything. I didn’t even know how to play drums yet, but I had to try out for a band, and their favorite bands were Metallica and Slayer and stuff — and I had never [even] heard of these bands, you know? I’d heard Green Day… and Fall Out Boy… nothing really stuck.
I didn’t really love Metallica at the start either, [but] I’d learned all the songs. I’d learned how to fucking double-kick, and I had to learn how to play “Battery” as a 14-year-old. I had no idea what was going on, but [eventually] I was really liking the way the music was happening.
And then from there, I got introduced to Parkway Drive. As probably most kids in Australia did, I absolutely loved them. Then Bring the Horizon came through. Ethan and I both went to the same Northlane show, and they were opening for August Burns Red — [Northlane had] just released Discoveries, and both of us were like, “Oh, wow… that’s a take on heavy that we haven’t heard.” And we both bonded a lot over that.
…But you always come back to your roots. What we bond over now is Radiohead, Jeff Buckley and Gorillaz. Like, we’ve kind of worked backwards… but we still love how heavy music makes us feel.
Is there a way for you to reconnect to your roots in Thornhill on a different level, as a drummer? Do you and Ben have discussions about the beats?
Oh, yeah. We are all very hands-on. We’re about to go into the studio [for] the drum tracking session and ride it [out] together, because we’re all very invested on every little piece of Thornhill. We all have a say, we all have an opinion, and we all have history in it, you know? Ethan is such an incredible MIDI drummer, with the way that he actually makes these demos for Maida to riff on. And then Maida’s an incredible drummer.
You’ve got a song on BODIES called “Revolver” … not sure why, but it feels like we should cover that?
Sure, I think that makes sense with the name of the magazine. [Laughs]
What can you tell us about your “Revolver”?
It was a nightmare of a song. We hated it, and we didn’t want to put it on the record. That is absolutely how it came about.
But look… we’re just little shits when it comes to heavy music. We know we need to do it, but we struggle to do it, I think. Like, the songs that come out [of us] naturally aren’t “Revolver.”
I mean, that was one of the first demos coming from [2019’s] The Dark Pool… or maybe [2022’s] Heroine… I can’t remember which one. So, we actually came back to it, because we really liked the breakdown in it. Well… they really liked the breakdown — I was always a bit against that song, I’m not gonna lie.
That was the last song to be finished [for BODIES], just because Ethan and I had to keep tearing it apart to find the soul of it — in the sense of, like, the atmosphere, the synths and the progression, not just [it] being a heavy song with a fucking chorus, you know? That song was a battle, but it’s one of our favorites to play live.
It’s this push and pull that we have with writing heavy music. That’s why “Revolver,” as a [song title], spoke to us.
Thornhill ended up being invited to join the big Sleep Token North American tour, but that also meant that the band had to drop off of another planned tour. How tough of a decision was that to make?
That rocked us, honestly. It was really hard, and we all were really stressed, because it’s a horrible thing to have happened, I guess. And this is the thing, in terms of Sleep Token — that offer in and of itself [is coming from] a band that that has that pull, to be like, “Hey, do you want your life changed forever? Come on this tour!” Like, obviously we had to. You’d be stupid not to, basically.
But us being a pretty grounded band, I would say we also hated the idea that we’d have to pull out of something like this, and put a [another] band at a disadvantage. It sucks. It’s a shit thing to do, and it was something that we would have never done. Other than maybe Deftones, this is probably the only offer that we’d get where we’d have to make that decision.
We had calls with [LANDMVRKS’] management — we wanted to talk to them in person, but they’re from France, you know? We wanted to make it as clear as possible that we’re so sorry for putting [them] at this disadvantage, of trying to find [another] band this close to a tour. And that these people that have bought tickets won’t be able to see us. But at the end of the day, the reality that we had to face [was] that our band is a business, and that it’s a business where there are four guys that don’t get paid much to do what we do, and this is an opportunity to play in front of people [who] have never even seen or heard of us. We have to take every opportunity, and we have to give it everything that we have.
But to those people that couldn’t see us, we’re coming back. And if there’s any way that we could work with LANDMARVKS in any other capacity, we’d absolutely relish the thought. It’s a really rough position to be put in.
Is there a way to connect any of that to a lyric you bring to the new record’s “Silver Swarm,” which starts with the line, “I’m blessed with it”? How does that line resonate with the general experience of being in Thornhill over the past decade?
I don’t know about being “blessed with it.” I think we’ve worked our asses off to be where we are, and I’m incredibly proud of everything that we have done.
It’s a pretty hard road to come from Australia. It’s not cheap. It’s a very hard battle to fly everywhere and to do what we do. [But] I think we’re blessed with the opportunities and the people we’ve been surrounded by. We have amazing friends all over the world, amazing management, and people that really do support us.
I think the main thing that we’re focusing on now is making sure that we are seizing opportunity with the best our band has to offer — in terms of skill, performance, dedication, all of it. Like, this is a moment for Thornhill to be what we dreamt was always going to be the case. But now it’s real, and it’s in front of us, and we’re going give it everything that we got.
What excites you about hitting the road with these songs on this particular Sleep Token tour?
We wrote them for an arena. We wrote them for the big stage. “Diesel,” [which opens] the album, was always meant to be played at a festival or in a big room. We haven’t had that opportunity until now.