Toronto, Canada-based punk artist ThxSoMch shared the final single ahead off his debut album, “Keep It To Yourself.” The full project, The Sound of You Laughing, arrived August 29 via Atlantic Records. .
“Keep It To Yourself” began as an inside joke between the artist and close collaborator and producer, grayskies (d4vd, Wisp), a hypnotic guitar riff and a freestyle. ThxSoMch recalls, “Sometimes, we’d come up with an idea and the other person would say. ‘you can keep that….to yourself.’ One day, grayskies wrote a crazy syncopated guitar riff and I started freestyling over it, the joke presented itself again but instead of a punchline it became a song, and that song is “Keep It To Yourself.”
Recorded over seven months in Brazil, isolated from everything and everyone he knows alongside producer grayskies, ThxSoMch poured himself into a body of work that fully captures everything he is today–it’s vulnerable, raw and made with true intention and a clear purpose. Recalling what it felt like to make, the artist shares, “It put me in the best mental place I’ve been in for a long time. No phone, no English, no sense of time—just a flow state that let me escape everything else. Creating this was like a cigarette after a long craving. I hope it can be that for someone else too—a fix, a release, something to hold onto when everything else slips. It’s the sound of acceptance and the sound of burying what’s really going on. It’s mockery and coping, choking and surviving.”
Produced by grayskies and mixed by legendary producer and engineer Mike Crossey (The 1975, Arctic Monkeys) the album is as much self-expression as it is escapism, where he finds both solace and catharsis for himself and fans alike.
The fully-charged project sees the multi-faceted songwriter, producer and performer find his own sound that disrupts both rock and rap as he delivers a fast-paced, exhilarating and honest examination of the self and life’s impermanence.
Full of energy and emotion, ThxSoMch continues, “It isn’t a cure—it’s a distraction. A pause. A breath between breakdowns. Just long enough to feel okay before the weight comes back. You can’t laugh forever. You laugh until you choke. And then it’s not so funny anymore.”
