Canadian band o’ brothers funk rockers, The Thick are back on the scene with their new single, “If You Don’t Already Know”, off of their album of the same name.
“This is one of the more mysterious sounding songs on the record, and it’s our personal favourite,” the band says — including members Charlie Rosenberg, Richard Stirling, and Jeff Stirling. “The song touches on personal regret and nostalgia, yet we find solace in these aspects of our lives through the performance and the expression of the song.
It’s the cornerstone of, not only this album, but of our entire discography.”
Check out “If You Don’t Already Know” below and find out more about The Thick via our Five Questions With segment.
Care to introduce yourself to our readers?
I could tell you all about our lives, but that would need a book and a half. Maybe all you need to know right now is that we’re a band of brothers, the kind that are related by blood, but that’s not the only thing that courses through our veins. Rock n’ Roll, Funk, and Blues rush through our brotherly bonds and carry us off the stage at our live shows. The band consists of four members: Richard Stirling, Jeff Stirling, Charlie Rosenberg, and Ben Rosenberg. We enjoy the simple things about making music, like playing a live show that gets people dancing, moshing, crowd surfing, anything that breaks a person out of their everyday cage. In the same sense, we bring that same energy to our studio sessions where we record live in a room together. We wanna see the intensity in each other’s expressions, the reactions when we’re hitting a groove together and we want to make our live experience available to anyone who wants to listen to our record. We’re just trying to keep our values in the band to be about the music and playing our hearts out live.
Tell us a bit about your music and writing style.
We write music that tastefully blends all of the genres that inspire us most and try to inject them with the perfect amount of pop and flare so that when we play our music live it causes uncontrollable dancing and keeps listeners humming along long after the song ends. We don’t feel bound to any one specific genre, we don’t want to write ourselves into a box of ‘what our sound is’ so we leave all the doors open. The key is to just do what feels good and sounds good to us, those are the only categories that apply to what is The Thick’s sound. On our album “If You Don’t Already Know” I’m sure you will find more than just one sound on the record, all the while finding it unmistakably THICK. When we write, we don’t pay too much attention to what the final product may or may not be. It’s a process of trial and error, exploration, trust, and just letting the fun and creativity flow. We don’t just stay in our respective instrument’s lane either, when it comes to everybody’s different parts, we take pride in our ability to collaborate and inspire each other by offering up any and all ideas for each other. Sometimes we have guitarists making suggestions for drummers and vice versa, other times we have bassists and guitarists throwing ideas back and forth when constructing a deadly riff. So that’s our music and writing style, an exploration of electric sound and style.
How are you keeping creative without shows? What are you spending your time on?
Well, although it is unfortunate that venues are closed up currently, we were fortunate enough to have just finished recording our debut record “If You Don’t Already Know” in January of 2020, just before everything locked down. We were originally planning on promoting it through live shows and demonstrating the power of our music in real time to full audiences as we always have done before, but this lockdown actually gave us an unforeseen opportunity. Because we have always focused on the live and raw aspect of our band, like playing live, booking gigs, and touring, we had always neglected our online presence as it was secondary to our core value of playing live. This lockdown has given us the opportunity to work on content and to promote our album online rather than at live shows. We put up our website (TheThick.ca), created merchandise, music videos, promo videos, and all kinds of other material to promote the album which has been a great experience for our band. Next on the list is to put together a live stream event or go busking. We’re excited to blend our newfound online skills into our routine when we can get back to playing shows.
If you were asked to suggest only one of your songs for someone to hear, which would it be?
I would say “I’ll do you one better, I’ll choose my top 5”:
1: If You Don’t Already Know
2: Reverse Gentrification
3: Through The Plains
4: Unpinned
5: Ms. Sundown
Canadian Beats is all about Canadian music, so who are your current favourite Canadian bands/ artists?
Currently, our favourite Canadian band is definitely The Sheepdogs, other than them, we also really love The Tragically Hip, Daniel Caesar, City and Colour, Rush, and Arcade Fire.