Following the massive success of their first new single in 13 years, legendary emo outfit Thursday has released their new track, “White Bikes.” The single arrives on the 25th anniversary of their first song release, which would have been featured on their 1999 debut album Waiting.
The group shares in an Instagram post, “SURPRISE! We’ve been blown away by your support this year: you’ve bought our merch, come to our shows, streamed our music. In April we dropped our first song in over a decade. Then in June we had the opportunity to spend some time at @hansastudios in Berlin, where David Bowie wrote and recorded Heroes, where Nick Cave, Iggy Pop, Depeche Mode and REM all made history. There are still magical places left in this world and Hansa is one of them. The result of this session — a song called White Bikes and a @duranite / @gotobednickscholey video documenting our time in Berlin — will start to appear online as the clock strikes midnight around the world tonight / tomorrow morning.”
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The post continues, “Twenty five years to the day that we unveiled our first ever song, we are sharing our newest one. This is our gift to you this holiday season. We hope you love it as much as we do. White Bikes started with an idea from @normanbrannon , and you can hear his distinctive style all over this song. @stu_richardson had the idea to produce the track like a nostalgic, upbeat, summertime version of War All the Time.”
“Geoff told us that the lyrics deal with the loss of a dear friend — one of the first people he ever played music with — who disappeared one day on his bike. This one means a lot to us for a lot of different reasons. We have no record label, we have no ‘team’ behind this. But we have each and every one of you and that is all we’ve ever really needed in these 25 years… White Bikes on the side of the road.”
In the YouTube description for the accompanying music video, frontman Geoff Rickly shares, “‘White Bikes’ started with an idea from Norman Brannon, who came to us from one of our favorite bands of all time, Texas Is The Reason, and you can hear his distinctive style all over this song. It might be the first true example of our ‘Thursday is the Reason’ era.”
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He continues, “We fulfilled a life long dream of recording it in Berlin’s famous Hansa studios, where Stuart Richardson had the idea to produce the track like a nostalgic, upbeat, summery version of War All the Time. The lyrics deal with the loss of a dear friend, who was one of the first people I ever played music with. Before he disappeared on his bicycle, he asked me to meet him but I never made it to the meeting spot. Now whenever I see a white bike on the side of the road I think of him.”
The track bleeds with ‘90s emo nostalgia, with Rickly’s raw vocal delivery gliding over wistful instrumentation. The track’s anthemic chorus, “Am I still waiting?”—uncannily mirroring the band’s debut title—could just be a coincidence, but everything Thursday does is usually deliberate. In that instant, past and present blur, forging a sense of full-circle continuity as a band.