“It definitely is the ‘story of us’ in a lot of ways,” Caroline Thornbury says of Prude Boys’ first full length album, titled Greatest Hits. “It’s a lot of our memories and experiences. We’ve toured on some of these songs and we’ve put so many late nights and fights into writing and recording them.”
Caroline is the bassist and lead singer of this Detroit-based three-piece band, which she co-founded with guitarist Quennton Thornbury back in 2013. And to answer both of your questions, firstly, these bandmates started sharing that surname five years ago when they were married and, secondly, yes, this is their first full-length, first LP, first “album,” per se, after 10 years of existence (while still notably having released several singles and a couple of shorter playing EPs over that span of time).
As Caroline indicates, though, this is an all-encompassing compendium of songs, which is why it felt both sincere and satisfyingly tongue-in-cheek to title the record Greatest Hits. The album is available via Outer Limits Lounge Records, and the band, along with their new drummer Evan Ecklund, will be celebrating with a performance — where else but at the Outer Limits Lounge, this Saturday night.
Quennton is quick to confirm that each one of these songs, even “the fun ones,” are very “personal” to them, while several have a disarmingly heavier subtext having been penned by Caroline during a period of grieving after her sister passed in 2016. But Quennton also notes that when Caroline mentions any “fights” that may have occurred during this album’s creation process, that it was actually singular, only one fight, really, and even then, not only was it kinda cutely frantic, but also brief.
“I’d been compiling some of these grieving songs,” Caroline says, “and we did try to release those in 2018, but the recordings didn’t end up sounding the way we wanted and we kinda put them on the back burner. But, then, I suppose it was over quarantine when we started feeling like: We gotta get these fucking songs out, man! These songs are too important!”
Prude Boys have been around long enough for local music fans to potentially already feel acquainted with their sound: an exhilarating blend of surfy, strutting, ’60s pop rock and grimy, riffy ’70s sludge, made indelible by their sensibilities for a perfect hook and a super sweet melody. The aesthetic was always a little bit cool, a little bit greasy, and a little bit nostalgic, but always embossed with a ton of heart and emotional earnestness. Their tumbling rhythms and reverb-soaked guitars were always sweetened quite poignantly by Caroline’s angelic lead vocals, often curled at the ends with a distinctive vibrato.
The band’s been around for a decade and they’ve already played more shows than they can even recall at this point. But Caroline and Quennton are well aware that this album could quite likely be the very “first impression” that many listeners will have of the band. “A full length, an LP, is really putting your stamp down,” Quennton says. “There probably will be people discovering us for the first time with this record, even though it’s been 10 years in the making. It’s a bunch of different eras, over the course of which we’ve been building up this catalog…”
“We’ve just been practicing for 10 years; we’ve really only just started!” Caroline jokes and they both share a laugh. “But, no, there really have been so many different little eras of our band,” she says, going on to reference how their true origin goes back to early 2012, when she and Quennton first met in Ann Arbor and initially started making music under a different yet similar sounding band name, before eventually moving to Detroit. Quennton estimates that they’ve had, roughly, about “five specific formations, or eras” over the years. Evan Ecklund, who joined the band more than a year ago, is actually their fourth drummer to date.
But perhaps they were too aware of what was at stake when making that crucial first impression. All together, the completion of Prude Boys’ Greatest Hits took three full years, rife with rerecording, remixing, re-overdubbing, and remastering of several songs (from several eras), including a little bit of their own experimentations at home helmed by Quennton, (a considerably experienced audio engineer in his own right), and then two different 10-song sessions with producer Adam Cox at his Hamtramck studio. “And then we even started from scratch entirely with a couple songs,” Quennton adds.
“We just couldn’t seem to land on a layout,” Caroline says “that we were happy with – or a list of songs that we felt were really worthy of being put out on a first full length.”
“We wanted our first LP,” Quennton says, “to have a bit of a jukebox feel, where not every song was produced the same. So having all these recordings at our disposal gave us different options, but we were just being picky…”
Anxiety eventually crept in, Caroline admits, and they perhaps started being a little too shrewd or over-analytical about every little detail. “And you tell yourself that nobody will notice if something’s slightly off-key for just one second,” she says, “but then realize, months into it, no, Caroline, in fact, it’s very noticeable…”
“I didn’t realize we were like this,” Quennton chuckles at their mild perfectionism. “I always had that punk mentality of just wanting to get an album out as quick as possible. But our better sensibilities told us that we could do it all a little bit better.”
Plus, like any independent band or artist, this is an entirely DIY operation. “And if we’re putting all of the band’s resources into it,” Caroline says, “we’d better be fucking happy with it.”
And they are happy with it — especially, Quennton adds, due to the assist from Cox. But as they look ahead to the release party this Saturday, they both admit to feeling a mixture of triumph and sentimentality.
“There’s a chance I’ll cry on stage,” Caroline says, and it sounds like a quip at first, but an undertone of absolute sincerity lingers after, as though an echo from her earlier quote is threaded like a whisper underneath: “...these songs are important.”
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