In the Year of Our Lord: Thursday Played Three Full Albums in a Century-Old Church and It Was Everything

Stone Church — June 6, 2026

Review and photography by KM North | IG: @filthyluckproductions

There are shows you attend. And then there are shows that rearrange something inside you.

Saturday night at Stone Church was the second kind.

Let me set the scene, because the scene matters. Stone Church is a building that has been standing since before 1900, which means it has absorbed more human feeling — grief, reverence, joy, desperation — than most venues will ever come close to. The gothic doors. The stained glass catching whatever light it can. A balcony that looks out over everything. And hanging above the stage, in what can only be described as an act of God-tier venue programming, a disco ball. A stage maybe ten inches off the ground. Workers who are always on their game and make you feel like you're exactly where you're supposed to be. This is the room Thursday chose to play three full albums in. This is the room that earned it. Old Canes.

Opening the night, and setting the tone more precisely than they may have realized, were Old Canes. Acoustic guitar and a drum kit. That's it. And they played the hell out of both. Sometimes fast. Sometimes loud. Always with the kind of feeling and passion that reminds you why stripped-down music exists in the first place — because there is nowhere to hide. No effects to bury yourself in. Just the song and whoever is playing it.

As someone coming to Old Canes fresh, I was locked in immediately. Great songs delivered with total conviction by great people. They are currently on tour with Tim Kasher, and after about thirty seconds of their set, it was obvious why. You don't put just anyone before Tim Kasher. You put a band that can hold the room and mean it. Old Canes held the room and meant every word.

Tim Kasher

My wife leaned over to me after Tim Kasher's set and said, "He sounded familiar but I couldn't place it." I said one word: Cursive. She nodded immediately. That's the thing about Tim Kasher. You feel the lineage of him before you can name it.

What Kasher has, and has always had, is a songwriter's gift for that particular slant. The angle on a feeling that makes you think you've heard something you've never actually heard before. He has a new album out through Born Losers Records (also on Bandcamp, so go find it), and he played it right out of the gate and didn't slow down. He told stories between songs. He bellowed certain lines and then dropped to barely above a whisper for the next one, the kind of dynamic control that can't be faked. And then, as if the set needed another dimension, he announced a new film — written, directed, and scored by him, because Tim Kasher contains multitudes — and played a song written specifically for it.

He is not his first rodeo on film. Google him after you read this. Thank me later.

His power and his passion were infectious, which is exactly the right way to walk a crowd into Thursday.

Thursday

That one word. You already know.

Like Converge. Like Cash. Like Abba. One word and the whole thing opens up. For me, Thursday arrived when I was fifteen years old and desperately needed a band to become the complete soundtrack to my teenage years. I had the punk. I had the hardcore. I had the metal. What I needed was the full substance — lyrics that could devastate me, music that moved through me like an emotion I didn't have a name for yet. Thursday was that band. I knew every word, every line, every momentary pause. I wore out copies. I memorized the breathing.

And then they became everyone's band. And unlike some people who came up in the era of "selling out," I was never angry about it. I was happy. I loved that they touched others the way they had touched me. It felt like evidence that the thing I'd felt at fifteen was real.

Tonight, in this century-old church on a Saturday in June, my band played three full albums.

Three.

No Devolución

The set opened with Geoff Rickly standing atop the balcony railing, reaching out over the room, delivering a hymn that only he could muster. There is no other way to describe it. It was a man conducting a religious experience in a room literally built for religious experiences, and it worked completely. Then the band came in, and they opened with No Devolución in full.

This is the atmospheric record. The deeper cut. The album that asked more of Thursday's audience and got it. Hearing it live for the first time, like really hearing it, in a room where it could breathe, was life-affirming in a way that word doesn't usually earn. When the first notes of "A Gun in the First Act" hit, there were audible gasps from the crowd. Not polite recognition. Gasps. The band played the hell out of every moment of it. Given everything that surrounded the making of that record — everything the band carried into and out of it — hearing it live added a layer that I don't have precise words for. It was awe. It was weight. It was something.

A City By the Light Divided

Everyone leads with Full Collapse, as they should. But A City By the Light Divided is the album that made a lot more fans for Thursday, and it deserves to be said plainly. "5-4-3-2-1" on the radio. Thursday on MTV, not just MTV2, actual MTV. Hot Topic doing what Hot Topic does. And underneath all of that, a record that earned every bit of it: complete, locked-in, hit after hit. "The Lovesong Writer" is the kind of song you hear once and then immediately have to hear again. It is a band with its full lineup finally solidified, operating at the peak of what they could do.

During this stretch, Geoff talked about New Jersey. Smiled while he said it. Told stories, shared meanings, recalled where things came from. It was a man, a band, who had been through the full arc and come out the other side, able to look back at their own work and say: this is our art. Here it is. And then they played the hell out of it.

Full Collapse

The album that decorated a thousand mixtapes. That launched a thousand other bands, some of whom made a solid living off releasing something one-tenth as good, and should be grateful every single day. Full Collapse is monumental, and I do not say that only as a fan. I say it as someone who was there. Someone who saw what came before and what came after and watched what happened to music in the space between. Music was not the same on the other side of that record. It still isn't.

To watch a sold-out room scream along to every word. To watch them sway when Geoff swayed. To feel every person around you feel every second of every song, it was chilling in the best way the word has ever been used.

I will be honest about "Understand in a Car Crash." At fifteen, sixteen, knowing what I knew about my own life, it was the song I listened to the least on that album while quietly believing it was the best song on it. I wore out my copies on "Paris in Flames" (Geoff's speaking voice in that song is as perfect as anything I've ever heard, a note I made again while listening to his book, Someone Who Isn't Me) and on "Cross Out the Eyes." But at forty, knowing what I now know about life and about myself, watching "Understand in a Car Crash" played with the kind of passion that leaves the band visibly spent and leaves every person in the crowd voiceless and drenched in sweat because they were right there with them — it hit differently. It was a sobering moment to witness.

I swore under my breath when they walked offstage. I didn't have prettier words. I still don't.

In the year of our Lord 2026 — and yes, the phrase earns its full biblical weight when you consider Geoff Rickly leading a sold-out crowd in something close to a Thursday psalm inside a century-old church — I got to watch a life-changing band play three full albums. Life is not always easy or kind or worth the trouble it asks of you. But nights like this make a compelling argument for staying.

Personal note: a bucket list item got checked off at this show. I got to photograph Thursday. I would personally like to thank Geoff for making that possible, and to thank him and the entire band for bringing it all the way around — and for making it worth every year of loving them this much.