188. Song No. 2,873: “Dying in New Brunswick,” Thursday
Waiting, 1999

*(CW: suicide, death, sexual assault)*

Screamo is not at all a genre I’ve ever gravitated to, and anything hardcore-adjacent tends to turn me off completely. But the melodic restraint that defined how beautifully Thursday pulled off both had me completely hooked for two face-meltingly intense albums, and I’m sure a little Garden State kinship added to the appeal, too.

I once heard Kurt Vonnegut, one of my literary heroes, described as someone who got so worked up over the importance of kindness that he swore about it, and that’s a lot of why I think Thursday appealed to me so much: Sure, I loved emo for being so unabashedly unafraid of exploring its feelings, but Geoff Rickly’s emotions were so open and raw that some of them could only be honored at the top of his screaming lungs instead of knitting another petulantly wounded song about it.

I totally missed the point of “Dying in New Brunswick” for years, largely as a consequence of discovering Thursday through their second album, 2001’s rightfully lauded Full Collapse, and then circling back to this debut masterpiece to immediately get both records and their respective tracks all muddled and confused with each other (…never mind the latter album’s infinitely improved production quality…) in an extended musical collision of suicide letters, car accidents and general invocations of death set against stunning instrumentals and powerfully flung vocals.

Instead of realizing this was a song about Rickly’s girlfriend getting raped and telling him about it, I thought lyrics like “You told me on your birthday / All the things that this place had done to you” and “You counted down the days / ‘Til you could say / ‘Bye-bye, City, bye-bye'” and “Will you look back on this night / As the day that ruined your life?” were all imploring the dead to resolve all the questions their departure left unanswered. And, naturally, I proceeded to cannibalize them for AIM away messages when I was feeling especially, over-dramatically overwhelmed by life and the late-teenage angst peculiar to those staring down the brink of adulthood while also being way too poorly regulated emotionally to handle being a bona fide grownup.

With a little distance and a whole cultural awakening later, there is a bit of a weird disconnect in considering how this song is about a man’s visceral reaction to his girlfriend’s sexual assault. I mean, I want women to be able to tell their own stories and Rickly does focus on his secondhand feelings because he can’t speak for another person’s lived-in experience, but it is a dimly uncomfortable reminder of those reckonings and reconciliations I have to internally grapple with as I delve deeper into my predominantly white-male-created music collection, where women are more often reduced to agents of heartbreak than treated like autonomous entities while a muted sense of entitlement weaves its way through lyrics about infatuation mistaken for love. But bringing the uncomfortable into the spotlight of conversation is how stigmas are weakened and allies can help foster a more accepting environment that allows these kinds of stories to be told more openly so fewer and fewer survivors feel like they’re fighting a common demon alone.