Every band wants to release a Thriller! As !!!‘s guitarist Mario Andreoni explains it:
“Thriller didn’t merely come to represent the selling of a lot of records…it became synonymous with an artist(s)’ and/or genre(s)’ artistic high-water mark. INXS’ Kick is the Australian Thriller…Alanis’s Jagged Little Pill is the Canadian Thriller…Wham’s Make It Big is the blow-dryer’s Thriller…every recording by the 13th Floor Elevators is the dosed-man’s Thriller…Sister Ray by Velvet Underground is the Thriller of musical fever dreams. One day at the studio, Nic [Offer, vocalist] drew THR!!!ER on a napkin and I liked it…then we made our THR!!!ER.”
For their fifth full-length, !!! was looking for a different approach in the studio, one that wasn’t as concentrated on recreating the high energy of their live shows, but instead allowed the band to delve deeper into the songs themselves. Most of the album was recorded by Jim Eno, the drummer in Spoon and the band’s board operator for live gigs. He explains, “They had this working flow that was a little rigid and I wanted to break them out of it.” The results promise to be less jam oriented, and if the sound snippet from the album preview is any indication, it will draw heavily from the psychedelic side of krautrock. As vocalist Nic Offer puts it, ““We’ve never tried to make the same record twice, we might have accidentally, but we’ve always tried to push on. For this one it felt like we definitely shoved off from the shore.”
