The members of Thrice were still teenagers when they recorded and released their full-length debut, “Identity Crisis.”
Soon after, the Irvine, Calif., quartet had amassed a fan base large enough to attract small record label Sub City, which oversaw the band’s critically acclaimed follow-up, “The Illusion of Safety.” The disc garnered enough attention to land Thrice a major-label deal with Island, home to superstars such as U2.
Currently on tour with Dashboard Confessional, Thrice has become an indie-rock sensation, due in part to their growing reputation as nice guys.
From its earliest days, the band has made good deeds part of the plan, including donating a portion of profits to charity.
“It seems like the right thing to do,” drummer Riley Breckenridge told RedEye. “It’s not like we’re selling billions of records and raising a ton of money, but anything you can do to help is a good thing.”
You spent last summer on the Warped Tour. Any fond memories?
It’s definitely not the best place to see a band, but we had a great time. It’s a long tour, and it gets kind of taxing. It kind of feels like “Groundhog Day” because every day you wake up and it’s exactly the same and you see the same people and have the same conversations and play the same songs. The only thing that’s different is the name of the city you’re in, but that pretty much looks the same too. It’s really fun, but I don’t know if there’s one band that you could talk to at the end of the tour that would do two more weeks.
Your brother Ed also plays in Thrice. Are your parents proud?
Yeah, they’re kinda like fan geeks, wearing the T-shirts and hats and stuff. I’m glad they’re supportive of it ’cause when the band started, Ed and I, we’re like, “Ed’s dropping out of school and Riley’s quitting his job so that we can be in a band.” They’re like, “Uh what?”
Are you concerned about getting too successful?
There’s been a lot of stuff that we’ve turned down in the past few years–tours with big bands like Linkin Park. We want to grow and be as successful as we possibly can, but success for us is not measured with record sales or people we put in the seats. We want to grow at our own pace, and that means not playing on the Pepsi Smash show or putting our music in commercials.
Did your record company call screaming when you turned down Linkin Park?
We’ve definitely butted heads with them on a lot of things. Obviously, a label’s job is to sell records, and they see those tours as ways for us to sell more records. But we hold fast to what we think is the right thing. If it takes a bunch of phone conversations with them screaming at us and trying to get us to do things, in the end, we want to do what we want to do. We’re not gonna budge.
Thrice
When: 7 p.m. Friday
Where: Allstate Arena
Tickets: $23.50-$26, 312-559-1212
———-
Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com)
