Will Thus Love’s Rock & Roll Dreams Come True?

T
here’s no mistaking Echo Mars for anything but a rock star. It’s in the way they carry themselves through the world, with a quick, confident step and a starchild aura that evokes Bolan, Bowie, and multiple characters from the 1998 film Velvet Goldmine. It’s in their ink — DRAMA scrawled on their neck in stick-and-poke capitals, spiderwebs and jesters snaking down their arms, BITCH jumping out across their chest when they rip their shirt off onstage. Most of all, it’s in their voice, leaping from a throaty growl to a wolfish howl you can’t ignore.

All of this makes Mars, 26, the perfect frontperson for Thus Love, one of 2024’s most exhilarating bands. The Brattleboro, Vermont, four-piece recently released a raging garage-glam wildfire of an album called All Pleasure, and if you catch one of their shows you’ll walk out a fan. Even so, Mars’ defiant punk energy can draw some stares from the neighbors back home. “All these fucking ladies with their labradoodles,” they say. “I think they see in me an old version of themselves. They’re getting their organic food and they’re doing this and that, but they see somebody who clearly doesn’t have any money, covered in tattoos, and they get defensive.”

A few weeks ahead of the November release of All Pleasure, Mars is sitting across from me at a cafe in Ridgewood, Queens, a charming, voluble presence in a white tee. “No one looks at me in New York,” they add with a grin. “It’s fucking great.”

All Pleasure is Thus Love’s second album, and the first one to feature a newly energized lineup that pairs Mars and their self-described best friend, drummer Lu Racine, 27, with guitarist Shane Blank and bass player Ally Juleen, both 30. In many ways, it feels like a debut, trading in the dour post-punk of their 2022 LP Memorial for a muscular new sound, all shiny riffs and unleashed id. 

Mars grew up in rural Vermont, born in a bathtub and raised in a century-old farmhouse. At their mom’s urging, they took classical cello and vocal lessons as a kid, but lost interest in their early teens. “I was like, great, I like to listen to it, but I don’t want to play this shit,” they recall. “It means nothing to me other than just beautiful music.” 

Around the same time, they began to develop a taste for performance, going to Shakespeare camp and playing Hamlet to many compliments at age 13. “All through my childhood, I’m, like, the pretty blonde young lad who is good onstage,” they say. “So I got comfortable with people looking at me to a certain degree.”

Soon, Mars was exploring punk rock, along with subversive, stylish acts like Grace Jones and Gary Numan. They gave themselves their first tattoo at 14 using a sewing needle and pen ink. “It was just three polka dots on my hand. That shit got so infected, it fell right out.”

Though they emphasize that theirs was a happy childhood overall, Mars felt increasingly stifled in the small town where they lived, especially after the death of their father when Mars was 15. “It was just me and my mom, and we had a pretty intense time,” they say. “We didn’t have a lot of money…. It wasn’t like I cut and ran. But I had to move to a more populated space.”

At 17, Mars left home for Montpelier — Vermont’s artsy capital city — in search of a job and a music scene. They hung out at a record shop and joined a band that went nowhere. When that didn’t pan out, Mars moved again, to Brattleboro, planning to go back to school. Almost immediately after arriving, they met Racine and recognized a kindred soul.

“I relinquished all hope, and as soon as I let go of this dream, it seemed to just kind of fall right into my lap,” Mars says. “Which is really beautiful and speaks to the power of manifestation, in my opinion.”

Mars and Racine recorded Memorial while sharing a small downtown apartment in Brattleboro with Thus Love’s original bassist, Nathaniel van Osdol, at the peak of the 2020 pandemic. “We had all this time and we had all these songs, and we were anxious and uncertain about the future,” Racine tells me. “We were all convinced we were never going to play again.”

As soon as they were able to tour again, though, things started speeding up for the then-trio. “We were trying to be as loud as possible,” Mars says. “For all of 2022, we played Memorial like a punk record.… Somehow these glittery, doomy songs translated as hype.”

Thus Love had a deal with Captured Tracks, the Brooklyn indie label behind beloved 2010s releases by DIIV and Mac DeMarco, and a growing fanbase in the U.K., where audiences responded well to their glowering tones. But they found themselves back down to a duo after van Osdol quit the band in 2023. “Being away from home, not making money, the emotional, spiritual, and physical toll … I think it just became too much for them,” Racine says, noting that he and Mars both consider their ex-bandmate a dear friend. “They’re like, ‘I love you so much, but I can’t do this anymore.’ I mean, that takes a lot of bravery.”

Salvation arrived in the form of Blank and Juleen, who’d met each other as students at Boston’s Berklee College of Music and spent eight years in a band called Bat House. (“We started as a math-rock band with some very proggy tendencies,” Blank says. “Then it turned into synth-pop,” Juleen adds.) They crossed paths with Mars and Racine in the summer of 2022, when Thus Love opened for Bat House at a New York show. “I remember watching them play and I turned to Echo,” Racine says. “I’m like, ‘I will do anything in my power to get Ally to join our band.’ ” 

The warm, kind vibe of Thus Love’s current lineup is evident when I meet them later at TV Eye, a bar and venue where they’ve all performed. The two pairs of BFFs sit around a booth, finishing each other’s stories and smiling a lot. “The combination of Echo and I’s history of playing together for so many years now, with the energy of the new lineup… It’s like breathing new life into it,” Racine says. 

 “I think fun would be the word,” says Blank, who moved across the country from Seattle to join Thus Love in Vermont.

“It is one of the most joyous musical experiences that I’ve ever had in my life,” Juleen agrees. 

All Pleasure channels that liberated feeling into songs like “Get Stable,” which pairs a razor-sharp guitar groove with lyrics about domestic instability, and the title track, where Mars sings about craving “a place to call home.”

There’s a cold reality behind that line: Mars’ closest thing to a permanent address right now, they tell me, is a 2008 Mazda manual sedan. “I’ve been houseless many times in my life,” they say matter-of-factly. “I was when I moved to Brattleboro, and I am again now.… I live out of my fucking car. I’ve been living out of it since June. And I will be, likely, until we leave for tour in January.”

Indie rock hasn’t been a reliable route to riches for a band like Thus Love in a very long time, if it ever was. Things are looking up for them, in the sense that they just released one of the most incandescently awesome rock albums of the year, but they’re under no illusions that it’s going to let them quit their day jobs. (Racine washes dishes at a restaurant in Vermont, and Mars recently started making pickles for a friend’s fermentation company.)

“God, it’s such a bitch,” Mars continues. “You have to want it to keep doing it. Statistically, bands break up. It’s really hard to do…. The difference is just that we kept going.”

A few weeks later, I see Thus Love play an album-release show to 200 or so people packed into Brooklyn’s Elsewhere Zone One, just days after the reelection of a president who explicitly campaigned on hate towards queer and trans people. A shirtless Mars climbs up on Racine’s bass drum, pushes their head against the venue’s low ceiling, sings like they have nothing left to lose. “Do you believe in love?” they ask, and the crowd responds with cheers.

“It’s an overwhelming time to be in this country right now,” Juleen tells the audience between songs. “But thank you for being here.”

“We’re having a lot of fun,” Mars adds before launching into the next song. “This is our reason to live.”