Thornhill Take Us Behind The Scenes Of New Album, 'BODIES'

2025 was always going to be a big year for Naarm/Melbourne alternative metal outfit Thornhill. After all, it’s ten years since their formation, and after such massive heights and accomplishments over that decade, it only makes sense that they mark their anniversary with a stellar new album.

Having debuted in 2019 with The Dark Pool, 2022's Heroine sent them to #3 on the ARIA charts and scored them a nomination for the Best Hard Rock or Heavy Metal Album at the ARIA Awards. Needless to say, they've been on a solid upward trajectory for years now, leaving fans to wonder what could be next.

That answer came by way of the announcement of third album BODIES, a rich and mellifluous album that revels in lush textures and the bold aesthetics only Thornhill can deliver. Intense, creative, and steeped in their unique blend of ingenuity, it’s a record which sees the band in full flight, going headfirst into authenticity and evolution without alienating their fanbase or forgetting why they got into the world of music to begin with.

Put simply, it’s a tremendous album that is the result of plenty of hard work for the quartet, and one which they’re clearly very proud of.

To celebrate the release of the record, we asked vocalist Jacob Charlton and guitarist Ethan McCann to share some exclusive insights into what went on behind the scenes of the record’s creation, shining a spotlight on the little known facts that helped BODIES take shape.

Ben Maida’s Living Room

Ethan: The first little known fact about the making of BODIES is that most of it was written and recorded in [drummer, Ben] Maida’s living room. It was a free space, so it was cost effective. And his parents were in Europe for two months at the time, so we could make noise into the wee hours of the morning, which was very helpful.

Shutter Door Synths

Jacob: On TONGUES, there was a faulty sound that we sampled, and it ended up being the main synthy thing on that song. We had these shutter doors on the windows and we wanted to close them because we wanted to vibe out in the dark for a bit. And those shutters just made this wild sound, when we heard it we were like, ‘What the fuck?!’ Then we thought, ‘Let’s do a TikTok thing and record it and sample it’ (laughs).

Ethan: It was that, and also the note it made going down was in the same key of the song we were writing in that moment. It was funny because all of our ears, except Maida, our drummer; all of our ears pricked up and we’re like, ‘That’s the same key!’ Maida was just sitting there still looking at his phone because he’s a drummer and he doesn’t know what that means.

Jacob: He was probably on Facebook Marketplace like, ‘Where are the golf clubs at?’

PIzza & 7/11 To The Rescue

Ethan: Also, our producer ate Bubba Pizza for seven days in a row while we were making BODIES.

Jacob: And seven days a week, he’d go to 7/11 every day as well. 

Ethan: Yep, we lived off Bubba Pizza and 7/11 for seven days during the making of this album.

Upstairs, Downstairs

Jacob: It was kind of cool, we had a setup where we’d finish a song in the living room to a point where we were happy with it instrumentally, and then Cage and I would have a different setup upstairs.

I’d track that song we just did upstairs while the guys would start another one downstairs. We had an assembly line going on here and there for a bit, we’d come and meet each other at the stairs being like, ‘How’d you go?’. It was fun.

Revolving Singles

Ethan: When we started recording, Revolver was actually going to be the first single. When we first started writing, that was the first song that was fully done, and we were like, ‘Oh my god, this is the one!’ But then by the end of the process, it was the one that we hated the most. And then we just refused to make it a single. It was the most metalcore so we wanted to bin it. 

Jacob: But we weren’t allowed to bin it. And we couldn’t write a better song to replace it, so we had to keep it (laughs). We tried to rewrite that song so many times.

Ethan: Yeah, up until the last week, there were six or seven different versions of it, just us trying to turn it into a completely different song – but we just couldn’t get it the way we wanted.

Crafting Crush

Jacob: With CRUSH, we had the idea of it, but then we were both like, ‘Oh, it’s done…but it’s not’. It was only a verse and a chorus at the time. We didn’t touch it until the end, and then we realised: now we have to do this, we have to finish this if we want it on the record.

I was writing a lot for my solo stuff, which is very R&B and poppy, and I was like: if you want me to take this one off your hands, I can try and get it somewhere; but if it doesn’t suit, we won’t put it on the record. And I think we all ended up liking where it came to. I just went to Cage’s, I had no idea where I would head with it, and just freestyled most of it. And it stayed that way, which was fun. It was a cool little pocket moment.

From Interlude To Album Closer

Ethan: And finally with the last track on the album, For Now, initially there was a different version of a different song that didn’t make it. It was supposed to just be an interlude, but Jacob and I were like: ‘no, this interlude is too good, it has to be a song’.

Maida was already in Sydney tracking drums for the rest of the album at the time, and we had a rough idea of what we wanted him to play – but the song wasn’t put together yet. So we just got him to track six different versions of the same beat, and we ended up chopping it all together in the studio the day that we handed in the album.

Jacob: Yeah, we basically sampled the kit for that whole thing. I actually forgot about that until just now. We were like, ‘Yeah, an interlude’s better than a song!’ Then we had to make the song at the last minute. So stupid (laughs).

Thornhill’s BODIES is out now.