What originally drew you to The Thermals? Was it the controversy in the lyrics, or perhaps the catchy, raucous pop punk that drives their music to a singular level of intensity? No matter how you found out about The Thermals, odds are that you’re a fan. With a new record coming out in September and a tour that may never end, The Thermals keep a schedule that’s as busy as any in today’s music scene. Still, Hutch Harris, lead singer of the Portland trio, took the time out to talk with Inyourspeakers about some of the concepts from the recently announced Personal Life, the highlights of touring across America (including a little talk of cannabis in the green-loving NYC) and working with a new label. As always, read on for the good stuff.

Inyourspeakers: You’re releasing a fifth album this September, on the heels of your last album and constant touring. Will you ever stop working?

Hutch Harris: We like it more and more actually, the more we do it. When we keep the momentum up, it’s not as hard as when we have to keep stopping and then have to start again, plus since we started working with Weston, our fourth drummer, it got even easier. In the past, every time we got a new drummer, we would have to take a lot of time just learning old songs, so we weren’t really moving forward.. Now that we are really settled with Weston, we’ve been able to move forward; even in the past two years alone we’ve been working more than most years before that.


IYS: Now that you’ve spent some time on both Sub Pop and Kill Rock Stars, what can you say are some obvious differences between working with each label?

HH: Really it’s not incredibly different. Sub Pop is obviously a lot bigger of an operation, and they have a lot more people in house. The label has at least twenty or thirty people working there to do all the press and arts, whereas with Kill Rock Stars, they do everything out of house, and hire those people. Other than that, they’re really quite similar.


IYS: You wrote you’re most recent single titled “Canada” right around the Winter Olympics. It’s a single that won’t be on the new record, and seems to be out of the blue. What’s the story behind this song?

HH: Yeah that one we actually wrote about a year ago and it was not specifically to be for the Olympics. I can’t say we actually give a shit that much about the Olympics, but we do love Canada. We were just playing a show in Buffalo and the next day we were going to go to Toronto, and Toronto is a lot of fun, so we just kind of wrote this funny little song in the van called Canada. We ended up recording the track, really just to be a B side; it was going to be that last thing we put out, not the first thing. Chris Walla (who is producing that the new record) was like “You know, I’m friends with this DJ in Toronto and I really think you should send it (Canada) to him cause the Olympics are coming up.” The guy loved it, and started playing it right away, before it was even out. So we just kind of moved quickly to put a single out, and it is something that definitely came out of the blue. I guess we just love Canada.


IYS: Personal Life will be the first album you’ve worked on with Chris Walla since More Parts Per Million, which was about 6 years ago. How was working with him different this time around?

HH: Well, Chris worked on the second one too, he worked on Fuckin A as well, and we love working with him. I can’t say it’s that different this time around from before. Chris is just a really good producer, he gets really good sound, and above all that he’s really fun to work with. Really, we just love working with Chris.


IYS: You’ve been given the chance over the past 8 years to work with many iconic musicians, such as Chris Walla and Brendan Canty. Of everyone you’ve worked with, who has had the most important impact on your music?

HH: Right now, I’d have to say Chris just because he’s worked so many projects that we’ve done, and at the same time we love Brendan and we got along really great with Brendan and the same thing with John Congleton, who recorded Now We Can See. You know, we have made good and bad decisions in our career so far, but as far as who we’ve chosen to work with in recording, I feel like we’ve always made really good decisions. We’ve always worked with people that we really like.


IYS: On Now We Can See the attitude of your music changed from anger towards society in a religious and political sense, to a more self reflective mood. What was the concept you had in mind when creating Personal Life, and what would be the major difference between this record and your last one?

HH: Personal Life is more about personal life. It’s about relationships and it’s about love, and it’s about how it can be, or really is hard to be in a relationship with someone. Its differences from the others, well, I want to say it’s not as grand or as dark as the previous records, but it actually is. We kind of laughed about this before, how we sing about politics and religion and the world coming to an end, and we sing about death, and yet somehow the record about love is just as dark as those subjects to us.


IYS: Many members of the press have mentioned your constant maturing and growth in your sound that is noticeable on each new album. Would you say that Personal Life is your most mature album yet in its theme and songwriting?

HH: I don’t think so. I think a lot of the lyrics are purposely immature. That’s kind of necessary for me to sing about love that way. It’s kind of more like high school poetry then the last couple of records. I mean the first couple of records we did the lyrics were super simple, and then the last two I feel like I definitely got my writing to a place that was a lot more mature, like really catchy but really smart. I really tried to go back to a way more, I don’t know. I just tried to be a little immature about it and write lyrics the way I wrote when I was 17 and 18. Which is natural too for singing about love and being with someone because that’s the kind of you’re usually writing when you’re that age.


IYS: Has working with themes made writing song lyrics easier, or has sticking with a concept been difficult?

HH: It definitely makes it easier. We started with this on The Body, The Blood, and The Machine where I wrote “Here’s Your Future” and then I just really liked the lyrics, and liked the theme and I just figured there was a lot more to say with that. So that’s kind of how that record ended up having such a strong theme. Now I like writing that way so much that I wrote the last two records the same way as well.


IYS: You’re going to be touring in China in Australia, before returning to the East Coast for more shows. After basically being everywhere, and touring constantly for years, what part of the world has stood out as a favorite?

HH: The Netherlands are really fun for us, as is Germany. But honestly, though it’s really fun to travel abroad, and it will be really great to go to Australia and China, I think we love touring the U.S. the most. We were just in California for a week and had a great time. It’s just comfortable here, and it just makes sense because we’re from the U.S.


IYS: Your last east coast show will be at the Brooklyn Bowl on 4/20. How will you be celebrating 420 this year?

HH: I think smoking weed, but we’d be doing that on any day in New York too.


IYS: So you’re not treating it as a different holiday?

HH: Well when we’re on vacation, and I call it a vacation because you can’t help but be a tourist in New York, we just always have a great time and it’s always kind of a party. So really nothing special, just living the good life in New York.


IYS: Has being from Portland had any influence at all on your musical career? What would you say is the best aspect of the city?

HH: One of the best things about Portland is that it’s really cheap, so it’s not a really big city, but you get things that you would get in other big cities. That definitely has an effect on anyone that’s creative, and the music and art scenes have really come a long way in Portland because of it. Artists have a lot of time to create as opposed to working all the time to pay rent.


IYS: As festival season approaches, which festival are you most looking forward to playing?

HH: I don’t think we booked any festivals (yet), though we played a bunch last year in Europe. Actually, we’re doing a bunch of festivals in Australia, so that’ll be rad. It’ll be my first time, so I have no idea what that’s going to be like. We have some stuff I can’t talk about because we haven’t announced it yet but we are going to do some stuff starting in July, and then we’ll maybe do some of the late summer festivals. Nothing confirmed officially yet though.


IYS: Has any show you played stood out in your minds as the most memorable of them all?

HH: We play the Bowery almost every time we’re in New York, but we played it in 2006 in the fall or maybe it was 2007, and that was fucking amazing. Then we played something called The Melt Festival in Berlin, and that was another amazing show too. We’ve actually played a lot of really crazy shows in Germany.


IYS: On your website you call yourselves a” indie/alternative/post-pop-punk rock” band. If you had to narrow your genre down to something a bit more specific, what category would you say your music falls under?

HH: I guess alternative, just because we love the nineties.


IYS: What records or bands have had the greatest impact on your music?

HH: The Breeders were always, for a long time, my go-to band when I talk about where the sound I like and the style of songwriting I like comes from. Kim Deal just writes songs that are really interesting, but really simple. When you sit down to figure them out they’re just not complicated. The way she arranges songs and just the sounds they get on those records are just so interesting and stony. It was just something I related to when I was really young.


IYS: As 2010 begins, where do you see the Thermals going in the next decade as a band?

HH: Well do you think the world is going to end in 2012?

[laughter] I don’t know, I think we always kind of made a point in the past to never plan too far ahead. When we started, we got to a point where we were planning our lives 6 months in advance and that was crazy to us. Something this band has always done is not worried too much the future and not have any huge, grand goals. I feel like we started at such a small place, and we’ve come so far already. We’re usually just so happy where we are that we don’t worry about the future too much.