NO SURRENDER

After weathering personal loss, sobriety and a changing line-up, A Thousand Horses have traded country-radio polish for raw nineties-rock grit, to finally deliver the aggressive, “full-throttle” album they were born to make.

- Words: Rob Hughes

In August last year, A Thousand Horses released a new single titled Voices.

A dark and expansive beauty, it was a foretaste of what the Nashville-based trio called “the full-throttle rock album that’s been sleeping in our souls all along”. The response from fans was overwhelming. So much so, in fact, that it outperformed the band’s platinum-selling signature song, 2015’s Smoke, within weeks of release.

“That was such a great thing to see, because you never know how people are going to respond,” says lead singer Michael Hobby. “We’d decided to be brave, artistically, with what we wanted to do. And I think people recognised that this felt real, that it felt honest.”

Voices covered deep psychic terrain: abandonment, isolation, torment, recovery. It’s indicative of the lyrical concerns of newly released parent album White Flag Down, by far the band’s most personal work. And heavy themes require heavy sounds. As promised, this is A Thousand Horses at maximal effect.

“Life came at us pretty fast and we had to figure out a way to get all that out of us,” Hobby continues. “There is a cathartic element to this record. I think you can hear that with the more aggressive side of things, because there was anger and pain in that, and frustration. And there was a lot of real emotion that came with it.”

It’s a beautiful, becalmed morning in Nashville, the sun flooding through Hobby’s window as he and lead guitarist Bill Satcher talk to Classic Rock. Just a week ago this scene was unthinkable. Music City was then in the grip of devastating ice storms that left a trail of carnage. Power lines were down, thousands of homes suffered severe damage, and travel was nigh impossible. Several fatalities were reported. Thankfully, though, as Satcher observes today, “the worst of it is over”.