By: Jesse Striewski
I can remember my introduction to Ireland’s Therapy? as though it were yesterday; my friend and bandmate at the time Joe brought a copy of their then-new album, Infernal Love, to our seventh grade science class. We huddled around a walkman listening to snippets of tracks like “Misery” and “Me vs. You,” and I can remember thinking how truly unlike anything I had ever heard prior to that moment they were.
But it was their previous, breakthrough second full-length album, 1994’s Troublegum, that I ended up going home with a dubbed copy of on cassette that day (along with Paradise Lost’s Draconian Times on the B side, for good measure) and falling in love with first. Everything about it seemed to speak directly to a ’90s teenager like myself, and I ate up every minute of it, from album-starter “Knives” all the way to “Brainsaw.”
By the following weekend, our little garage band was attempting to do our best amateur renditions of some of the album’s now-classic tracks, including “Screamager,” “Nowhere,” and “Die Laughing” (the latter of which my guitarist Scott and I would actually go on to record a video eventually for an English class project, with the lyrics being altered by yours truly to fit the assignment accordingly. Needless to say we each received an “A”).
The more noise-rock infused sound the band had originated on their initial EP’s and first album (1992’s Nurse) evolved into the more pop-punk influences of Troublegum, and found the band in their absolute prime. In short, the album is still a masterpiece in its own right, and a time capsule that reflects an era of music far superior than any of their contemporaries at the time had. To this day when I’m asked who my favorite band is, I struggle to think of one that ranks above Therapy?; they’re truly the band that changed it all for me, and it all started with Troublegum.