By Hilary Saunders
The Thermals’ sound is fitting for Wynwood’s aesthetic. The Portland, Ore.-based trio is scuzzy and malleable, and its most recent album, Desperate Ground, is its darkest opus yet.
But The Thermals have a sing-along (or at least shout-along) quality that gives the band a semblance of accessibility. And like Wynwood, there’s a reason people keep coming around.
Front man and guitarist Hutch Harris admits he doesn’t know much about the Miami neighborhood where the band will be closing its Florida tour tonight. “I think the last time we played Miami was at Churchill’s,” he recalls. “And that was a really long time ago. It was one of our early tours.”
Having already championed the city’s favorite smoky dive bar, The Thermals should be pretty comfortable with Wynwood’s grittiness, especially since it’s been validated with hipster cred as of late. (The band played West Palm Beach’s Respectable Street on Thursday night.)
In its 11-year career, The Thermals have explored a range of genres. The band’s 2006 album The Body, The Blood, The Machine first garnered attention for its scathing commentary in two-and-a-half-minute, guitar-driven political indictments. But by 2009’s Now We Can See, The Thermals mellowed out to embrace boy-girl harmonies courtesy of Harris and bassist Kathy Foster.
The Thermals’ sixth album, Desperate Ground, which dropped in April, returns to four-chord simplicity and invokes both ’90s lo-fi cult figures like Pavement and more current punk rockers like Brooklyn’s The Men. Additionally, the band, whose other member is drummer Westin Glass, is venturing into the realm of visual art with this week’s release of a video game for its next single, The Sword By My Side.
Though the trio has been touring for months at a time since Desperate Ground was released, they consciously decided to return to Florida on a separate trip. Harris acknowledges that the Sunshine State has treated them well over the years, although he seems ambivalent to the contradiction of playing brooding tunes in a perennially summer-like environment.
“So many good punk bands come out of Florida,” he says, tracing one genre of state’s musical heritage. “You have Against Me! and the whole Gainesville scene and No Ideas Records and stuff. For me, when I look at where most of the cool punk bands came out of the U.S. in the past 20 years, they’re pretty much in Florida or California. You always get these places that have sun all the time that are really nice. But then you have a lot of cops and you have a lot of conservative people, so then you get punk bands in those areas, which I think is really cool.”
For a punk band with pop influences, though, Harris sounds remarkably happy, even complacent. Every show so far on this romp through Florida has been “good;” audiences have been “cool;” the band’s tour mates, Hollywood’s psych-surf trio Beach Day (that released its debut LP Trap Track Attack this past summer), are “awesome.”
And when The Thermals and Beach Day end their tour at Gramps tonight, the show will be not only a homecoming of sorts for the opening band, but also a birthday celebration for the venue. “Gramps’ 1st Birthday Weekend,” as the bar is promoting it, features the two bands in a free show that, even accounting for “Miami time,” is supposed to start at 9 p.m. Resident DJs Mikey R and Benton, as well as guest DJ Lolo (of Sweat Records) will also be spinning throughout the night.
Harris exclaims that he’s looking forward to the gig and repeatedly expresses how excited the band is to play its final show of 2013 in Miami. He initially gives a shout-out to Beach Day’s fans, noting, “It’s awesome that Beach Day is with us because they’ll have a lot of their bros out.”
But thinking back, he says, “When we announced our U.S. tour there were so many people who wrote to us on Facebook and whatever that were like, really upset that were was no Florida. So there’s a lot of people that really like us in Florida and really care and are really passionate about the band, so it’s nice to play for them.”
THE THERMALS and BEACH DAY appear at Gramps, 176 NW 24th St., Miami, at 9 p.m. Friday. Free; 21+; visit https://www.facebook.com/grampsmiami
Hilary Saunders is a freelance writer in Miami. Follow her on Twitter at @Hilary_Saunders.