Thyroids’ new EP, Gelatinous Happiness, is what you need in your life when you’re on your way to work in the morning.
The band has been around since 2014. Along with their two previous releases, Gnarlands and Oh Well, this third EP brings their total recorded output just over the 30-minute mark.
Thyroids is a band driven by a pure punk rock ethos. With six tracks slapping you in the face, Gelatinous Happiness is sure to wake you up and get you going to wherever it is you have to drag yourself.
The lyrics are minimal, the music is lo-fi and the attitude is snotty — the way punk rock should be.
The album’s first track, the instrumental, gas pedal-stomping “Hyperactive,” is sure to have you raising the volume to make sure there is actually something playing. That's when you realize the quiet samples have gotten you to turn your stereo to 11, where the band meets you with an all-out sonic assault.
On “Home of Your Own,” singer Kenny Thyroid shouts the 1-2-3-4 count and brings the audience into a world that is all revved up with no place to go where you’ll find acceptance.
In the spirit of the Ramones, “I Don’t Wanna Work” follows with its petulant middle finger raised up to the banal drudgery of what we have to do when we’d rather be doing what we want to do.
“You ever worked in the service industry?” Thyroid says about the song’s inspiration. “No offense to you if you haven’t, but it’s not all laptops and coffee meetings. Really though, it was probably a string of bad days and definitely a flash of inspiration.”
“You ever worked in the service industry?” – Kenny Thyroid
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That flash of inspiration fades into the slow and sludgy instrumental “Divinations,” but the band picks it back up in the repetitious and infectious “Basura” before rounding it out with the raving, anti-consumerist attack, “How is Egg?”
If you ask the band what they want audiences to get out of this EP’s short statement, they might respond as their new bass player Mitch Burroughs does with “Absolutely Nothing.”
Or, if asked what the motivation behind releasing the EP was, they might deflect and say, “Our [former] bassist Pablo [Pena]. We had him, but we weren’t going to have him anymore. We wanted to send our friend off with a good end,” as drummer Mark Bitter does.
However, you shouldn’t let their attitude fool you. Thyroids know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re doing it well.
Pena, who worked in and around the Dallas music scene for the better part of a decade before his five-month stint in touring and recording with Thyroids, says the band refused to record the album digitally even though it would have taken only a day to record. Instead, they insisted on the intimate sound that analog recording brings despite how much more difficult, time-consuming and expensive the recording process is.
“Mark and Kenny’s ethos is what really brought me to them," Pena says. "The fact that they only wanted to record in analog, that they spend a good chunk of their paychecks to rent a practice space … they’re the kind of people who are going to play in bands for the rest of their lives.
“They’re my little punk brothers,” he adds. “They picked me up and gave me another home.”
Gelatinous Happiness is available now on Bandcamp, Spotify, iTunes and Amazon. It will also be available at through Dreamy Life Records as a CD or cassette.
No matter how you choose to consume the record, what Thyroids really want their audience to get out of the record is “their money’s worth.”
Thyroids will celebrate the EP’s release with two shows: Friday at The Tin Panther in Fort Worth with Mean Motor Scooter, Smokey Mirror, Bogan Villa and Cosmic Creeps; and Saturday at Spinster Records in Oak Cliff with Malpractica, Pleasers and Gusto Gav.
