The Thermals

Since it first reared its head in 1977, punk rock hasn’t come in waves so much as infesations, swarms, plagues of cockroaches. When their way of life destabilized (post-punk, new wave, etc.), the faithful foraged underground to found hardcore—itself the ancestor of pop music’s most violent and dissonant iterations. The lineup and the skulls shaking in the crowd may change, but, beyond all hope and all disaster, punk rock survives.

Its survival derives from its credibility, and its credibility, after more than 30 years, derives from its sense of iconoclasm. The underground history of punk is rife with bands that barely have any history at all; “true” punk musicians, to this day, revert to a sort of self-destructive loop of formation-creation-disbandment to avoid unwanted attention and the anathema of a “signature sound.” The idea of success is alien to punk rock, and simply not present in the lexicon. Bands that move forward—either creatively or commercially—must disown, and are disowned by, the localized and often incestuous punk communities they come from. But there’s a third direction, a direction that Portland indie-punks the Thermals have turned to with their fourth album, “Now We Can See.” That is, to put it bluntly, no direction at all.

Since forming in 2002, the Thermals have enjoyed a relatively comfortable living on a fan base fattened in no small part by the Pitchfork phenomenon. Unique among the bands in that tent, however, the Thermals cultivated a certain sound of fetishized outrage that looked faithfully back at the examples set by the impassioned lyrics of Joe Strummer and the infectious hooks of Buzzcocks singles. Their first album, “More Parts Per Million,” anticipated the more recent insurgence of lo-fi punk (No Age, Times New Viking, Wavves) with surprising acuity, trading in primitive pop riffs and paper-thin anthems, all wrapped in a sheet of feedback. The difference between the Thermals and those bands is that feedback was less a symbiote than the sound of growing pains. By the band’s second album, “Fucking A,” the outfit was tighter, the choruses were clearer, and most importantly, you could hear every pseudoliterate word leader Hutch Harris had to wail about. Lyrics painted a vague portrait of self-righteous rage and apocalyptic rebellion; Harris’s was the language of inarticulate teen angst projected on a romantically nihilistic worldview. They could be embarrassing—and, to be sure, sometimes downright stupid—but the only lyrics that could belong to music this catchy were inanely simple.

Harris’s distinctive yelps, razor-sharp guitars and a minor hit single, “How We Know,” paved the way two years later for the success of their third, and best, record, 2006’s “The Body, The Blood, The Machine.” In retrospect, that record seems a success more in spite of itself than anything else: the predictably facile “concept” of the album—a desperate romance in a post-apocalyptic dystopia—is kept at bay by irresistibly catchy tracks like “Here’s Your Future,” and “An Ear for Baby.” And though the songs all sounded the same, they all sounded great.

It speaks volumes, then, to say that their follow-up, “Now We Can See,” is the kind of flop that its predecessor could have been, if not for a mixture of pure ambition and pure luck. Where the lyrics could be ignored on their last album—or allowed to fade into the mix as a sort of campy soundtrack-to-a-soundtrack—the Thermals have made them the centerpiece here; something vaguely about reflections of life after metamorphosis and death in the ocean, but honestly who cares? Much of the guitar work seems warmed-over from their last record—and the one before that, and the one before that. While innovation was never the band’s strong suit, some thematic variation would be appreciated.

But like every seasoned pop band, the Thermals have a few gems to salvage from the wreck. The sloppy, manic “When We Were Alive” shakes with the same bracing fury—noisy riffs that fall like axe blows over gleefully deranged vocals—of earlier releases. “How We Fade” glimpses at those heights as it surges to a close, and in its valleys it remains a passably pretty stab at punk balladry. The album closer, “You Dissolve,” finds the band remembering how to be mindless without being mind-numbing, which is more than can be said for the likes of “Liquid In, Liquid Out” and the title track, the latter of which boasts a pretty irritating wordless-cheering section in lieu of a chorus.

So the Thermals find themselves on the long road through self-parody. It’s difficult, at first, to listen to a band squander the potential of a record like “Machine” on such a middling follow-up. But then again maybe, in appropriately punk fashion, they only had one great record in them anyway.

—Staff writer Ryan J. Meehan can be reached at rmeehan@fas.harvard.edu.