Thornhill – The Dark Pool: Where Djent Meets Shoegaze
How Thornhill Fused Djent and Shoegaze into Something Fresh
Album Title: The Dark Pool
Released: Octorber 25, 2019 | Label: UNFD | Genre: Metalcore, Post-Hardcore, Alternative Metal | Producer: Ethan McCann, Jacob Charlton
Tracklist
1. Views From The Sun | 2. Nurture | 3. The Haze | 4. Red Summer Everywhere | 5. In My Skin | 6. All The Lights We Don’t See | 7. Lily & The Moon | 8. Coven (feat. Fred Durst) | 9. Human | 10. Netherplace | 11. Where We Go When We Die
Into the Abyss: How Thornhill’s The Dark Pool Redefined Australian Metalcore
On October 25, 2019, Melbourne five-piece Thornhill released their debut full-length The Dark Pool, planting a new flag in the Australian metalcore landscape. While predecessors like Parkway Drive, Northlane, and The Amity Affliction had built a formidable heavy music tradition, Thornhill refused to play the role of mere successors.
Instead, they emerged as innovators, fusing progressive metal’s technical precision with shoegaze’s dreamlike atmospheres. The result is an album that dissolves genre boundaries and captivates both critics and fans alike.
The Making: Perfectionism Behind Closed Doors
The Dark Pool’s creation rejected the conventional approach of hiring a renowned outside producer. Instead, the band chose to maximize their internal capabilities through an intense, self-contained production process. Guitarist Ethan McCann and vocalist Jacob Charlton took the helm as co-producers, steering the album’s entire creative direction.
The Architects of Vision
As producer, Ethan McCann prioritized organic album flow over the simple stringing together of individual riffs. Drawing deep inspiration from The Contortionist’s Clairvoyant and Thrice’s Palms, he pursued a progressive compositional approach where unpredictable section transitions flow naturally like water.
McCann remained vigilant against “randomly forcing sections together,” focusing instead on creating transitions that feel inevitable, where mood shifts carry inherent justification. This philosophy explains why The Dark Pool feels less like a collection of songs and more like a singular, massive entity.
Jacob Charlton assumed total control over the album’s visual and conceptual direction beyond musical elements. Taking cues from pop icons like Elvis Presley, Justin Timberlake, and Gwen Stefani regarding performance and character construction, he handled everything from the band’s styling to music video scripting and direction. This refusal to separate auditory and visual experiences became crucial in maintaining the album’s consistent emotional thread.
The Engineering Team’s Technical Mastery
While creative direction came from within, transforming vision into actual sound required the expertise of professional engineers. Australian metal scene veteran Lance Prenc participated in the album’s engineering. Having built his reputation through work with Polaris and Alpha Wolf, Prenc demonstrated exceptional ability in crafting modern, aggressive drum sounds.
His trademark “Staged Clipping” technique eschews the overuse of single limiters for excessive loudness, instead employing multiple stages of clippers to control peaks and secure volume. Thanks to this approach, drummer Ben Maida’s performance maintains clear presence even beneath thick layers of ambient guitar and synthesizer.
Bassist Nick Sjogren handled vocal engineering, mixing, and mastering, completing the album’s distinctive sonic identity. Unlike typical modern metal that maximizes instrument separation, Sjogren’s mixing emphasized blending—instruments intertwining and bleeding into each other. He refused to place Jacob Charlton’s vocals overwhelmingly above the instruments, instead positioning them as part of the soundscape itself.
While keeping the low-end tight, he applied abundant reverb and delay to the high-end, aurally manifesting the damp, dark spatial quality befitting the title “The Dark Pool.” The bass guitar transcends merely supporting the guitar riffs from below, maintaining a gritty, growling texture in the mix’s center that completes Thornhill’s signature heaviness.
The Cost of Perfection
The production process placed immense pressure on band members. The obsession with proving themselves through their debut drove the technical difficulty to extreme heights. The band later recalled in interviews that while The Dark Pool is “a solid record, it was incredibly demanding to tour.”
Complex rhythmic time signature changes, relentless high-register vocal lines, and layered guitar textures proved physically exhausting to recreate live. This experience paradoxically became the catalyst for the band’s shift toward a rawer, more performance-friendly rock style on their follow-up Heroine. The Dark Pool stands as a monument to the band’s perfectionism—a peak they can never return to.
Musical Characteristics: Where Djent Meets Shoegaze
While classified as metalcore, The Dark Pool weaves shoegaze, progressive metal, and alternative rock into a complex tapestry. Critics and fans frequently describe this album as a marriage between djent’s rhythmic sensibility and shoegaze’s spatial atmosphere.
Guitar Depths
The guitar work of Ethan McCann and Matt Van Duppen serves as the album’s atmospheric cornerstone. They primarily employ seven-string guitars tuned to Drop F or lower. This extends far below standard tuning into territory that encroaches on bass guitar frequencies, producing deep, massive tones. These ultra-low tunings form the foundation of the album’s oppressive, dark atmosphere.
Gear-wise, McCann centers his setup around the Kemper Profiler Rack. This device digitally replicates real tube amplifier sounds, and analysis suggests Thornhill utilized profiles of high-gain amps like the Peavey 5150 or Mesa Boogie Rectifier. Combined with Tube Screamer-style overdrive pedals to tighten low-end bloom, they achieved a precise texture.
The guitars’ heart lies in Bare Knuckle Impulse Humbuckers—the Josh Smith signature model from Northlane—designed to maintain clarity even in low tunings without muddiness. This proves essential when playing complex chords, keeping each string audible.
Drum Precision
Ben Maida’s drumming can be summarized in one word: precision. He locks his kick drum to the guitars’ intricate rhythms while crafting groove through dazzling ghost notes on snare and cymbals.
Maida uses a Pearl Session Studio Select drum kit with Remo drum heads. Remo heads offer excellent durability and tuning stability, making them ideal for the repeated hard hits demanded by metalcore. The snare sound on the album features extremely high tuning with emphasized crack—that explosive “pop” that cuts through the dense guitar textures.
Vocal Versatility
Jacob Charlton’s vocal style serves as Thornhill’s most powerful differentiator. Beyond traditional metalcore screaming, he actively incorporates falsetto and clean vocals influenced by R&B and pop. His voice channels Jeff Buckley’s plaintiveness at times, Matthew Bellamy from Muse’s dramatics at others. Charlton doesn’t simply sing—he performs with theatrical intensity. The dynamic shifts from breathy whispers to throat-shredding screams maximize each song’s dramatic arc.
Ambient Utilization
The Dark Pool’s sonic masterstroke lies in its synthesizer deployment. Ethan McCann discovered analog synthesizers’ allure through the Stranger Things soundtrack and Thrice albums, incorporating them aggressively. Synth pads and arpeggios scattered throughout fill empty spaces while creating cosmic atmospheres. These electronic textures blend with guitar distortion to form Thornhill’s signature “wall of sound.”
Track Analysis
Nurture: Where Accessibility Meets Artistry
Nurture served as the album’s commercial driver. Its intro simultaneously introduces bouncing grooves and melodic lines that announce Thornhill’s identity. The chorus beginning with “I’m not strong enough” explodes with energy despite relying solely on clean vocals without screaming.
The song explores co-dependency, unrequited love, and inadequacy. The narrator craves salvation or nurturing from another while simultaneously feeling unworthy of that love. The direct lyric “Drowning in the dark pool” pierces through the album’s central theme.
Intriguingly, band members have expressed dislike for this track. Jacob Charlton intensely avoids performing it live, even making extreme jokes about his aversion. This likely stems from the song conflicting with the band’s current artistic direction (more raw, rock-star oriented) or studio over-processing making live reproduction cumbersome. Yet it remains fans’ most beloved anthem.
Where We Go When We Die: Apocalyptic Epic
This album closer represents the convergence of Thornhill’s musical prowess into a grand narrative. Across its five-minute runtime, the song gradually intensifies. The opening’s ethereal clean guitar tone transforms into a massive wall of sound. Particularly striking is the lead guitar’s tremolo picking technique drenched in heavy reverb, aurally translating the visual imagery of gazing up at a star-filled night sky.
Jacob Charlton explained this song criticizes humanity’s destruction of Earth’s paradise. The title “Where We Go When We Die” ironically skewers humanity’s attitude of wrecking the planet while vaguely expecting heaven after death. The music video centers on a character named Elwood depicting alien invasion or apocalypse.
Unidentified objects descend from the sky, taking people away, while the protagonist ultimately accepts fate amid terror. This expresses powerlessness and resignation before unstoppable catastrophe, alongside the strange tranquility blooming within that darkness.
Coven: Congregation of Heavy Darkness
Coven ranks among the album’s darkest, most aggressive tracks. Drop F-tuned guitars generate literally massive riffs that press upon the listener. Lyrics offer critical perspective on collective madness or blind faith, while the breakdown section drastically slows tempo with dragging rhythms that conjure suffocating dread.
Album Themes: Water, Abyss, and Existence
The title The Dark Pool functions as the album’s dominant metaphor. Water carries ambivalent meaning throughout—simultaneously the source of life and a space of suffocation and death. From the album cover art’s mingling of blue and black water imagery, the sonic mixing intentionally carved out high frequencies and emphasized reverb to create the muffled texture of listening underwater. This sensory expression captures how mental anguish—depression, anxiety, panic disorder—devours a person.
The track “Lily & The Moon” stems from Jacob Charlton’s experience losing his dog. He projected personal grief onto moon and night imagery, expanding it into universal separation sentiment. “Red Summer” evokes Australia’s bushfire crises and climate catastrophe, singing of powerlessness while watching a burning world. The title “Red Summer” implies catastrophic climate change, encompassing social and environmental messages beyond personal interiority.
Commercial Performance and Critical Reception
The Dark Pool debuted at number 20 on Australia’s ARIA Albums Chart in its first week. For a debut from a subcultural genre like metalcore receiving minimal radio airplay, breaking the top 20 on the overall chart signals the solid purchasing power of the fanbase cultivated through their previous EP Butterfly.
The album’s true commercial value reveals itself through sustained streaming consumption beyond initial sales. Approximately seven months after release in May 2020, the album surpassed 9 million cumulative streams. For a niche genre debut to reach such numbers proves exceptional, demonstrating the music inspired repeated listening beyond mere curiosity.
Australian national radio station Triple J selected The Dark Pool as their “Feature Album” for the first week of December 2019. This designation means the entire album received concentrated airplay for a week, providing the crucial breakthrough for the band to reach general audiences and festival promoters beyond the underground scene.
Critical response leaned heavily toward overwhelming praise. Sputnikmusic awarded 4.5 out of 5 stars with a “Superb” rating, analyzing how Thornhill pioneered a modern, sleek sound without relying on nostalgia while the metalcore genre stagnated. Distorted Sound Magazine granted 8 out of 10, comparing it to the originality and impact of Northlane’s debut Discoveries.
Some criticism emerged. The Soundboard Reviews delivered the harshest assessment at 5 out of 10, noting the album’s defining characteristic as “sounding like Northlane.” They criticized the band for adhering to tech-metalcore formulas with insufficient experimental spirit.
Fan response approached absolute devotion. In the massive r/Metalcore community’s 2019 year-end voting, The Dark Pool ranked 8th—a remarkable achievement for a debut band in a year flooded with comeback albums from giants like As I Lay Dying and Bring Me The Horizon.
Legacy and Influence
The Dark Pool became the launchpad for Thornhill’s follow-up Heroine reaching number 3 on the ARIA chart. Released in 2022, Heroine earned nomination for ARIA Award Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Album (won by The Chats’ Get Fucked) and achieved number 1 on the Australian Independent Albums chart. This represented the artistic capital The Dark Pool had accumulated.
When the band radically shifted styles on Heroine, fans responded with “We wanted The Dark Pool 2,” revealing their strong attachment to the debut. This suggests The Dark Pool became imprinted as a benchmark beyond simply an album.
The Dark Pool remains one of 2019’s most important Australian metalcore debuts. This album demands not mere listening but submersion. Only by willingly diving into that dark pool can one encounter the meticulous, beautiful chaos Thornhill engineered.
