Thou’s Bryan Funck Takes Himself Off The Pedestal

I have never been as mesmerized or fully immersed in a live music experience as I was witnessing Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s Thou for the first time at Clubhouse on South Temple. I kick myself for not discovering them early enough to have caught them at Diabolical Records years prior; the experience of that show was what compelled Thou to return to Salt Lake City following the release of Umbilical last May. I place Thou among the small handful of bands who, upon my first exposure to their work, altered the way I perceive and appreciate music for the better. By the strong email communication skills of SLUG Contributing Editor William Hughes, I found myself on a Zoom call with one of the musicians I most admire on a Saturday afternoon: Thou vocalist Bryan Funck, whose initial struggle to turn the camera on instantly and comedically humanized someone I had placed on a pedestal. Throughout the course of our hour-plus conversation, as he sipped a matcha latte, served me great inspiration and made me laugh, I learned just how much being on that pedestal is antithetical to Funck’s approach to art. 

Thou’s unique heaviness — characterized by downtuned guitars, meaty riffs and Funck’s visceral vocals — is the thread that ties together the band’s impressively profound and diverse catalogue, which spans over two decades. As “just the pretty face,” Funck insists he can’t take the credit for the group’s iconic tone. Instead, he sees it as a result of guitarists Andy Gibbs and Matthew Thudium, who, in Funck’s words, “have been playing guitar together for, like, 100 years.” Their synchronicity lends itself to a way of writing that’s become quintessential Thou. “We stick for the most part to a pretty low tuning, so that creates a lot of opportunities, but it also puts a box on the thing in terms of what it’s gonna sound like and it makes it a little easier to stick to that sound,” he says. It’s in this way that Thou has triumphantly managed to dip their toes in a breadth of musical experimentation without losing the sonic signature that makes their work instantly identifiable. 

Political conviction is — and always has been — integral to Thou’s writing, but that never comes from a place of posturing, preaching or even a conscious attempt to make a grand statement. Rather, the political is inseparable from the art of those who are made to reckon with it in their everyday experiences, worded best by the question Funck poses: “How do you take the politics out?” “People accuse us of being a political band all the time,” says Funck. For him, it’s innate, unavoidable. “It seems so intrinsic to me. I don’t know how you could be a person in the world and not have an opinion about certain things … I feel like you would have to go out of your way not to be [political].” Writing from a place of conviction and integrity provides an additional benefit: fucking with people who deserve to be fucked with. “Hemming in certain ideology that these apolitical metal type people find tedious or offensive, that’s fun. It doesn’t feel like posturing for us because there’s just shit we agree or disagree with [or] we care and think about so … We’ll put that in there and if it upsets this dipshit, that’s great. That’s bonus points,” he says with a laugh. 

“Humility and being a real person is definitely important to me and to the band [but] I would have a lot to say about whether or not we succeed at that.”

When it comes to Funck’s own sound, the process behind curating it is nowhere near as complex as one might expect. “That’s just the way I sound,” he says. “I don’t know what I’m doing … People ask me how I do it … I have no idea.” Rather than pursuing a particular sound, Funck’s journey as a vocalist has been much more about dialing in what works for him naturally. “I just figured out early on in other bands how to do it in a comfortable place without losing my voice or being in pain at the end of the set,” he says. Funck discloses that, despite his skill in harsh vocals, clean vocals aren’t his forte, which is why his partner, Emily McWilliams, lends her voice to the sung parts on Thou tracks. “[In] musical theater in high school, [I learned] I cannot hold a note,” he laughs. While he believes that his sound hasn’t changed much over time (“I personally don’t think my vocals have changed that much if you looked at Tyrant versus Umbilical … even though that’s almost a 20 year gap”), he credits “like, 800 shows and practice for 10,000 hours” for his improved ability to sustain what he does. Funck praises the band’s long standing working relationship with recording engineer James Whitten for the evolution of his and Thou’s sound evolution over time. “I feel like there’s been growth in the way we record stuff … [and] the way he handles my vocals on the records,” Funck explains. “It would be less cataloguing my growth and more seeing [what] we figured out in the recording process [and] tricks to make it sound a certain way.” 

Funck also emphasizes creating sounds and putting out work that he personally enjoys, above all else. “There’s probably some stuff I could do but … I’m not really into that, like, Cookie Monster stuff for the most part,” he says with a laugh, mentioning that his preference on vocal styling came up on Thou’s collaborative record with Mizmor, Myopia. 

Funck gives a nod to longtime friend Liam Neighbors (aka A.L.N.) — the man behind Mizmor — for the way his tastes pushed Thou to re-embrace their roots on Myopia. “He’s more of a fan of the older style … straight sludge doom stuff,” says Funck. That’s just the tip of Thou’s musically collaborative iceberg, which includes 14 split releases and both EPs and LPs created with Emma Ruth Rundle and The Body — an act Funck credits for the uptick in innovative collaborative records in the realm of heavy music. “Doing those collaborations … [we] owe a huge debt to Chip [King] and Lee [Buford] from The Body,” says Funck. “Those guys are the people who sort of opened the doors…In terms of our peer group doing those collaborations, they’re the true maniacs.” Collaborating with The Body on 2015’s Released from Love / You, Whom I Have Always Hated pushed Thou in interesting creative directions via The Body’s much more flexible and experimental approach to songwriting. The greatest determinant of which musical act Thou will collaborate with is simple — “It’s gotta be someone that we personally like … people we’re friends with or people we wanted to be friends with,” says Funck. In the case 2020’s May Our Chambers Be Full and 2021’s The Helm of Sorrow with Emma Ruth Rundle, Funck admits “the collaboration was really just a way for us to trick her [in]to com[ing] on tour with us.” Beyond strengthening relationships and setting up for touring opportunities, the goal of such collaborative records is to create a project entirely unique. “We always want to do something with somebody where there’s some junction where the two bands can meet but it hopefully won’t sound like either of the bands, it’ll sound like a new thing. That’s always the goal … for us to push them a little bit, for them to push us a little bit,” says Funck. 

For as much music as Thou has put out, even more work gets disposed of in the crafting of their records. “We just toss out a lot of stuff,” says Funck. Such was the case in the writing process leading up to 2024’s Umbilical. “We demoed that record more heavily than we have anything,” he says. These days, the process of throwing out or repeatedly reworking tracks is motivated by Thou’s desire to ensure that what they’re putting out in the world is fresh — for themselves, not just their audience. “The big thing for us now is [that] we try not to repeat ourselves too much … If we feel like we’ve done something to death, we’ll have to mess with it a bunch,” says Funck. “We struggle sometimes trying to come up with new stuff that’s exciting enough for us to [the point that] we feel like it’s the best thing.” 

Umbilical has received great praise from fans and music critics alike for the catchy riffs and breakneck speed that differentiates it from previous Thou releases and places the record more within the bounds of punk and hardcore than sludge or doom, which takes Funck back to his roots as a self-identified “hardcore dude” who “come[s] from punk.” Other determinants of the record’s overall sound were a desire to give more excitement and freedom to drummer Tyler Coburn and Funck’s growing frustration with stoic, unmoving audiences. “We wanted to give people more incentive to move around a little bit,” he says. When I ask if he ever anticipated the critical acclaim that Umbilical would go on to receive, he laughs. ”There was no expectation that we had that anybody would even care about the record. I’m glad they do, but I just wish they’d move around more at the shows.”

Funck emphasizes that his satisfaction with his own art is what truly matters, but his tendency for harsh self-criticism often presents a challenge when it comes to achieving that goal. “To me, it’s less about not having the material or ideas and more about not being able to execute them well … Getting something I’m happy with is the bigger challenge. I got plenty of ideas,” he says. The ideas in question often come from running lists of lines or ideas that Funck gathers throughout his day-to-day life. “I read and watch and listen to a lot of stuff and I’m constantly taking notes,” he says. “It could be a Barenaked Ladies song or a line from a book or just a word that struck me in a certain way or a line from a film. I’m constantly creating lists.” Funck is inspired by the references that permeate hip-hop, and “used to do [that] a lot in the old days, and definitely leaned into it real heavily on Umbilical, which was fun.” The greatest driving force behind the lyrics of Umbilical, though, comes from Funck’s own critiques of himself and the band, particularly when it comes to ego and humility. “I sort of wrote Umbilical as a Thou diss record,” he discloses. “Andy and I talk[ed] about how we wanted it to be a ‘line in the sand’ kind of record … We just had a lot of people coming to our shows or socializing with us that had a different perspective of the world that didn’t quite match ours.” This sparked self-reflection that compounded with what the band was experiencing at the time, creating what gave Funck direction for Umbilical’s conceptual path. “When I started writing for the record … it was sort of at a low point … probably us being on one too many tours or something … so it felt like it would be disingenuous to write a record proselytizing and trying to put us on some pedestal. We’re not on a pedestal. We fuck up all the time. We continue to fuck up,” he insists. Leaning into this, in Funck’s experience, lent itself to what he feels is better writing. “The writing is better if I’m turning it on myself than if I’m just complaining about something I disagree with,” he says. 

“We struggle sometimes trying to come up with new stuff that’s exciting enough for us to [the point that] we feel like it’s the best thing.” 

Seeking to avoid the pitfall of self-righteousness is important to Funck and Thou as a whole, and it’s apparent in the way they carry themselves at their shows — not to mention the humor, openness and humility Funck brought to this interview, but he’s constantly self-reflecting on how well he feels he sticks to that. “Humility and being a real person is definitely important to me and to the band [but] I would have a lot to say about whether or not we succeed at that,” he says. Funck hopes that up-and-coming bands feel similarly: “I want more bands to just be humble and real people and not get tied up in whatever music industry or scene politics stuff. That shit doesn’t matter at all. [It] has no impact on the thing you’re doing.” He also emphasizes for musicians the necessity of recognizing that having such a platform to express themselves is a privilege that should be seen as such. “Treat that opportunity with the respect it deserves,” he says. “I think bands should treat it with a little more care and respect and not just shit out whatever bullshit, gimmicky, fucking fly-by-night goofball stuff they wanna put out there to try to make a quick buck.” 

Thou’s greatness and longevity lies not only in their musical prowess and constant pursuit of fresh ideas, but perhaps more importantly in the humility and humanity far too many artists lose by reaching for the pedestal rather than the craft. Keep up with Thou on their website noladiy.org/thou and stream their profound discography on Bandcamp.

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