Netflix syndrome. Most of us suffer from it, even if we’ve never heard of it. It’s the phenomenon of spending massive amounts of time scrolling through online content, trying to choose what you want to watch. But rather than making a decision, you become frustrated and overwhelmed, settling on watching something you don’t really want to watch. Or worse, you end up not watching anything at all.
The same thing can be said about making music, as Brooklyn-based garage rock band the Thing attests to. The four members—Zane Acord (vocals, bass), Jack Bradley (guitar), Michael Carter (guitar), and Lucas Ebeling (drums)—have an ethos they go by: “With restriction comes creativity—old becomes new.”
“When you’re making something in our digital age, it’s really easy to have unlimited tools at your fingertips, and you can keep working at something forever,” says Bradley over a video conference call with the rest of the group. “How they used to record and make songs before the internet is that you had a due date. So we like to record pretty quickly and have it capture the time where it’s made, so in a month or in a few weeks.”
Think the Beatles making their first album, Please Please Me—John, Paul, George, and Ringo, together in a room, playing their instruments and singing live into microphones, in a single 12-hour session, with very few overdubs—that’s the mindset of the Thing. No distractions. No time wasted choosing the right digital recording tools. No outside songwriters. No frustration over extensive mixing to appease record execs’ tastes. It’s all analog and DIY.
“From the beginning of the band and making stuff, we’ve done everything on our own and just kind of stuck our foot in the door to really open it up,” says Bradley. “When you have these restrictions placed on you, whether it’s external or by yourself, it allows for a lot more creativity.”
The band’s third album, The Thing (August 6), is the latest example of their “with restriction comes creativity” way of making music. The rough and tumble suite of 12 songs nods to everyone from the Kinks to the White Stripes, and follows 2023’s debut, Here’s the Thing, and The Thing Is, which dropped in 2024.
“This one really represents us, and that’s why we decided to do self-titled, because I thought it was just strong and cool and really put our best foot forward,” says Bradley. “The process was really amazing because it’s all four of us in the room together. We basically wrote all the songs for the most part in the moment.”
Those songs include “Mr. Useless,” a David Bowie-inspired, Byrds-tinged tune about finding the meaning of life, and the swirling, 6-plus minute instrumental jam “Holy Water,” which is one of Ebeling’s favorites. “It’s pretty crazy that that was done,” he says. “Just not really any overdubs, except a little bit of djembe hidden in the one section. I feel pretty proud of that instrumental, that we pulled that off.”
Carter likes “Can You Help Me?,” which is the first time each member took turns singing a verse. “It’s got a hooky chorus, like a really blatant sing-along, which is kind of cool,” he says. “It’s kind of got a nice twang to it, which we haven’t really gotten into that much.”
No computers were used during the entire three-week process, which took place—songwriting and recording—in their tour manager’s pool house. And it’s all recorded on tape.
“We gave ourselves a rule of once we have the arrangement down, let’s try and track within three takes, because once you start redoing it a bunch, you start to think and the quality and the performance actually drops,” says Bradley. “So that was first take for the energy, second and third for more accuracy. Every song is just the four of us playing and with really minimal overdubs.”
“No clicks or anything either on that album,” says Ebeling. “It’s just like an old soul record, just super raw and like a session in a way.”
That means when the band plays shows—more than 300 globally since the Thing formed in 2022—every song sounds almost exactly the way it does on the record.
If you’re thinking that the band named themselves after the 1982 John Carpenter film with Kurt Russell, like I was, you’d be wrong.
‘We went through many names and eventually I think we just kind of got tired and just started calling it the Thing, says Acord. “It just came out one day and we were like, all right, let’s just move forward with that, before seeing the John Carpenter movie or doing any sort of research into copyright law or anything like that.”
When they did watch the movie a couple of years after they formed, however, they loved it.
“Kurt, yeah,” Bradley chimes in.
“We like Kurt Russell,” Acord reinforces.
The band has been touring full-time since 2023, with two U.S. and European tours, and for the first time this October, one in Australia. But most of their shows have been in New York City, where the city’s rich music scene helped shape their sound.
“When you are in and around the city, we all see so many different shows and there are so many good bands that are active and current right now,” says Bradley. “All the venues are super influential as well. The two best venues are TV Eye in Ridgewood and Our Wicked Lady, which actually just shut down, which is just really sad. We played our first show there, and there’s kind of a community around certain venues, and it sparks a lot of ideas because you go see some amazing bands and everything’s just moving so quickly. It seeps into you a little bit.”
“There’s so much going on, so much new stuff happening at any given moment,” Acord says. “We’re just honored to be in the New York scene and be amongst so many talented bands that are super inspirational to us. And, obviously, all the history.”
The Thing’s musical influences reach beyond New York City, however. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, the Beta Band, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre all impacted their music, as well as the Beatles, the Kinks, and other ’60s bands.
Carter cites these artists and others such as Ty Segall and the Osees as influencing the way the Thing records. “They record in their own home setups a lot of the time, and they record it just by themselves. So that contributes to a certain sound as well…raw”
Bradley says that while the music by these bands is inspiring, the way they conduct their careers is just as much so. “When a band or an artist records in the way that we’re talking about, like in a more raw, authentic way instead of polished and packaged together by some big label, that stuff is really inspiring. And people that put out a lot of music, we’re all super inspired by, like the Black Keys and the White Stripes. And just to be able to put out that many albums and not have to be so defined by one genre is super inspiring.”
The band remembers touring in Spain, in Basque Country to be exact; the Western Pyrenees area bordering the Bay of Biscay, where the region’s indigenous people live, have their own culture, and their own language, Euskara.
“We played in an old squatting house,” says Bradley. “It was like this big firehouse that a bunch of squatters had taken over, and we slept there in one big bed. We didn’t talk to a single person the whole time because we physically couldn’t.”
Acord says it was a pretty tense situation. “We weren’t really aware of the tensions between the Basques and the rest of Spain,” he says. “There were a couple of people who were just not approachable. One guy was working out in the dark, and I was trying to do a vocal exercise, and then he ended up cooking us dinner, and we weren’t really allowed to talk to that guy.”
“Even the dinner too, we didn’t sit together,” Ebeling adds. “They put us at the end. And then they gave us this butternut squash soup with not a hint of salt in it.”
Then, Acord adds, they played “Wanted War,” a track off their second album, 31 times.
“The dude down the hall didn’t sleep the whole night; he was just in his office listening to the song over and over,” Ebeling says. “A weird night.”
I mention that this reminds me of the Beatles’ stories of playing Hamburg in the band’s early days, pre-suits, Beatle boots, and haircuts, where they stayed in shitty little one-room ratholes, crammed into one bed. They wore leather jackets and slicked-back hair, sweat-browed and beaten from playing multiple sets, raw and feverishly, in small clubs to rowdy, drunken crowds of German men. It’s how the group became such good performers.
Like the Beatles in Hamburg, the Thing is still establishing their identity. In other words, they’re not well known. They use this to their advantage, which goes back to their minimalistic credo and work ethic. Carter says that the band uses this time in their career to examine how they want to be perceived.
As the Thing continues to expand their audience, though, Bradley prefers not to be referred to as simply an indie band.
“It’d be nice if we leaned away from the whole indie band thing because it just doesn’t really resonate with what we’re trying to accomplish,” he says. “We’re more of just a rock and roll [band] rather than this new wave of indie.”
No matter how they define themselves, one thing is certain: Every member has equal say on the band’s creative and business aspects. “We’re a true band, a four-piece collaborative project,” says Bradley. There are no frontmen, no Mick and Keith of the Rolling Stones, or Julian Casablancas of the Strokes, or John and Paul of the Beatles. “I think what makes us really strong is that it’s a unit.”
While it’s often said that rock and roll is dead, to this band, it’s far from it.
“It’s more of a spirit,” says Ebeling.
“I think true rock and roll is something that has energy,” says Bradley. “It’s really driven and it’s more loose. It’s not this tightened-up thing where it’s like each beat is on the measure; that falls into this modern indie thing. It’s an alive thing, and you can only really capture that with a band.”
Long live rock and roll! Long live the Thing!
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