Few bands have embraced evolution as fearlessly as Thrice.
From their early days carving out a place in the post-hardcore underground to their current role as one of alternative rock’s most unpredictable outfits, the California four-piece have built a career on constant reinvention.
At the centre of that journey stands vocalist and lyricist Dustin Kensrue, whose words have long carried the weight of searching questions and raw conviction. Known for his ability to fuse philosophical depth with human vulnerability, for over two decades his writing has resonated with fans worldwide as a source of hope, inspiration and belonging.
Serving as the through-line between the blistering urgency of 2002 breakthrough album ‘The Illusion Of Safety’, the ambitious experimentation of the band’s ‘The Alchemy Index’ project and the expansive soundscapes of 2018’s ‘Palms’, Dustin’s distinctive songwriting style is a core component of Thrice’s magic. Shifting from youthful fervour to reflections on presence, mortality, and resilience, his evolution comes into sharp focus on the band’s twelfth full-length, ‘Horizons/West’. A companion to 2021’s ‘Horizons/East’, its eleven songs grapple with identity, technological anxiety, and the search for clarity in a world that often seems deafening.
To celebrate their latest release, Rock Sound sat down with Dustin to revisit some of the lyrics he’s most proud to have written.
“My throat was an open grave, I drank your stained glass eyes // And they taste like dead cathedrals that are crumbling beneath the weight of ten thousand jaded tourists, who’ve traded in their hearts and hands for disposable cameras // Set to document to decay // Set to capture just enough of life to catalogue the things we throw away” ‘So Strange I Remember You’ – ‘The Illusion of Safety’ (2002)
“This was an interesting song to write, and fairly unique for me. The original idea was taking a phrase that someone had collected from EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) recordings. The phrase was ‘So Strange I Remember You’. I took that as a starting point and began to try to write the rest of the song in a stream of consciousness fashion. The rest of the song mostly came out at that point with a few minor edits, which is definitely not at all how I usually write, and I really love the end result. I especially like this section, which was written years before anything like Instagram, but seems to capture the spirit of the problems we face when engaging heavily with that kind of media. It’s so hard to live in the moment when we are trying to document the moment instead.”
“There’s no promise of safety // With these second-hand wings // But I’m willing to find out // What impossible means // I’ll climb through the heavens // On feathers and dreams // ‘Cause the melting point of wax means nothing to me” ‘The Melting Point Of Wax’ – ‘The Artist In The Ambulance’ (2003)
“This was the first story I wrote about the myth of Icarus. I wanted to write this song from the perspective of Icarus’ joy in pushing the limits of what was possible, rather than as a cautionary tale as it is popularly presented. At the time, I identified this idea heavily with the progress of our band. We had just signed with a major label and were continuing to try to push ourselves musically to new heights. We had no idea what would come next, but we were determined to, as the song says, ‘touch the sun or die trying.’
The second song I wrote about the myth was also not a cautionary tale, but rather a switch in perspective, focusing on the fatherly fears of Daedalus as he watched his son flirting with death, and eventually finding it as his wings came apart and he was plunged into the sea.”
“Saturn will not sleep until the sand has made us clean” ‘Of Dust And Nations’ – ‘Vheissu’ (2005)
“This song was originally inspired by a line from Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune. A preacher is yelling to a crowd in the city and says, ‘Sand will cover this place. Sand will cover you’. I zoomed this perspective out a bit from the specific setting on Arrakis and applied it to the whole of mankind and the way we strive to be remembered as some way of mitigating our inevitable demise. The amount of harm that comes from people chasing this kind of legacy is incalculable, and their goal is futile. The reference to Saturn is meant to invoke the idea of the passing of time, and the sand can be seen both as a literal eroding and smothering agent (think of Shelley’s Ozymandias) and also representing the sand of an hourglass.”
“Despite the best of maps and bravest men // For all their mighty names and massive forms // There’ll never be and there has never been // A ship or fleet secure against the storms” ‘Kings Upon The Main’ – ‘The Alchemy Index Vols. I & II’ (2007)
“This is one of four unique songs on ‘The Alchemy Index’. Each one closes one of the four EP’s, and each is written in the form of a sonnet written from the personified perspective of that EP’s thematic alchemical element (Fire, Water, Earth, or Air). This particular line is from the Water EP and is therefore written from essentially the perspective of the sea. I’ve always been inspired by nature in my writing, and the ocean particularly has always been one of my favourites, so it was really fun exploring various connections on this EP. This song ends up using the metaphor as a way to talk about the hubris of man, which incidentally is another thing I’m fond of writing about.”
“I slowly carve my soul away // Piece by piece I sacrifice // To comfort and peace of mind // I keep my toes on the party line // There’s nothing wrong dear, don’t think twice” ‘Doublespeak’ – ‘Beggars’ (2009)
“I’ve often told people that 1984 is the scariest book I’ve ever read. I still mean it. There’s something so uniquely chilling about the way that Orwell connects the usurpation of language with the usurpation of thought. There is perhaps nothing more dangerous than the creation of a large portion of society that can cheerfully hold mutually exclusive thoughts at the same time, knowing them to be incompatible in one sense, but also believing both with their whole heart. I never thought that I would see so much of this idea coming to the forefront in my lifetime, but I’m watching it play out every day. When people cheer loudly at the same event for both mercy and grace and also for retributive violence, something dark is being born. It’s terribly disheartening at times to see my lyrics seem more prescient over time, especially knowing that there are plenty of people who have loved and listened to them on repeat who are nevertheless enacting their opposite on a daily basis.”
“So keep holding on to hope without assurance // Holding on to a memory of light // But will the morning come? // For all I know we’ll never see the sun // But together we’ll fight the long defeat” ‘The Long Defeat’ – ‘To Be Everywhere Is To Be Nowhere’ (2016)
“This song is built around a concept that J.R.R. Tolkien named, which he called ‘the long defeat’. The long defeat is essentially the idea that things are inevitably falling apart and breaking down. But Tolkien felt that it was a moral imperative to not become fatalistic, but rather to resist and do good in whatever way we can, while we can. I’ve always found this a beautiful and helpful concept, and a stout inspiration in the face of all of the building horrors we face in our current age.”
“I will meet you there, don’t go to sleep // Our hearts and feet both bare, with grass beneath // The oaths we needn’t swear are vast and deep // Our breath will be our prayer, alone, complete” ‘Beyond The Pines’ – ‘Palms’ (2018)
“This is one of my favourite sections of lyrics that I’ve written, in one of my favourite songs that I’ve written. The general idea here, communicated in a few little pictures, is that of the value of presence to your actual life – unmediated by social masks or shoes – guided by love and webs of connection instead of brittle, rigid, deadly dogmas.”
“There’s another way to face the unforeseen // You don’t have to stay inside of that machine” ‘Robot Soft Exorcism’ – ‘Horizons/East’ (2021)
“The concept of a Robot Soft Exorcism is explicitly, and with endorsement, pulled from the writings of David Dark. You can search the web for this or simply read his book ‘We Become What We Normalize’, but either way I highly encourage further reading on the topic. I merely tried to put the idea into song, but the idea is explained helpfully and briefly in a quote from Evan Rosa from the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: ‘According to David Dark each of us occupy a variety of robots – roles, titles, occupations, institutions, conglomerates, ways of being, social norms, etc. – and these robots exert a cultural force, sometimes benign, but then again, sometimes violently destructive and degrading of human life. And in order to appreciate and honour our shared humanity, those of us in violent, impersonal robot systems need to be softly, humanely, respectfully, lovingly exorcised from those violent systems.’”
“But what if all we thought was darkness, was instead the truest light // What if all we feared was empty, was the fullness of our life” ‘The Dark Glow’ – ‘Horizons/West’ (2025)
“This line comes in the centre of the central song off our new record, and we placed it there purposely. I feel that it gets at the heart of one of the larger themes on the record, that is, that I believe there is something better for us if we can let go of our fear of death and mortality and our clutching after certainty and clean, easy answers. I like to use darkness – which we generally fear – as a metaphor for uncertainty and mystery, wherein lies illumination of a different sort. I’m playing here with the eastern spiritual idea of emptiness, which does not mean a strict nothingness in western terms, but rather an ultimate potentiality and the ground of everything.”
“They keep on telling me our stars are crossed // But I think that you might be my albatross // We learned to run before we learned to walk // There’s so much time to steal before the sun goes down” ‘Albatross’ – ‘Horizons/West’ (2025)
“When I’m writing melodies, I sing whatever half-formed words or nonsense that naturally comes out. Sometimes a line just sticks with me for no reason other than that it just feels right, and this ‘Albatross’ line was definitely one of these lines. I knew that it needed to be in the end version of the song, and I slowly built the rest of the song around it. I knew that I wanted to embrace the original meaning of an albatross, good luck, and not the idea of a curse that we get from Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, which seems to be the way most people use the phrase these days. Shortly after finishing the record, I showed my kids the TV show Firefly, and its companion film Serenity. I highly recommend both. Anyway, I was really excited when the antagonist tries to get another character to abandon a friend by calling that friend an albatross. The antagonist replies: ‘As I recall the albatross was a ship’s good luck until some idiot killed it.’”