Jacob Charlton says he hates it when people ask him what one of his songs is about, and he proved the point by feeding a lyric sheet into ChatGPT for a track-by-track breakdown. The Thornhill singer was at home in Melbourne during an extended Christmas break when he said the experiment was only the latest reminder of how the band likes to keep control of its own work.
“I hate it. It makes my blood boil. It just feels so lazy. If you want to find out what a song means, you should read the lyrics for yourself!” Charlton said. “I’m absolutely against every facet of AI, but I did find it funny to see this computer try to explain what I’d written, which is never really on that surface level of, ‘I love this person,’ or, ‘I hate that thing,’ and has me creating a lot of my own metaphors.”
The timing matters because Thornhill have spent the past year pushing further into the center of heavy music. The Melbourne band appeared on Sleep Token’s sold-out U.S. arena tour after releasing BODIES last year, an album that won them an ARIA and added to the momentum they built across a decade together. Charlton, Nick Sjogren, Ethan McCann and Ben Maida started out as school kids in Melbourne 10 years ago, and the group now has the kind of profile that puts its songs, visuals and image under a sharper public glare.
That is part of what makes Charlton’s resistance to outside interpretation feel so connected to how Thornhill works. “There’s so much more interesting stuff in the nitty-gritty of creation than in the final outcome,” he said, adding that the band had tried the ChatGPT exercise before. “We’ve actually done that twice.”
Thornhill have never treated themselves like a band that hands over the details and waits for the rest to be packaged for them. Charlton said they like to handle their own videos and clothing and be involved in every step of the process, a stance that fits the group’s history just as much as its present-day ambitions. Their debut album, The Dark Pool, arrived in 2019. Heroine followed in 2022, and Charlton said that record was shaped under the heavy shadow of his parents splitting up, selling the house and putting his dog down.
He also made clear that the instinct to push back is not new. “Probably because people said it’s what we shouldn’t do,” he said of Thornhill’s habit of leaning into the things that draw criticism. “It’s the whole teen angst thing. The more people diss a certain approach, the more you want to throw yourself into it.”
That attitude has helped carry the band from Melbourne schoolmates to a touring act with a growing international audience. The Sleep Token run showed how far Thornhill’s reach has stretched, but it also underlined something more durable: the group seems most comfortable when it is making the music, shaping the presentation and refusing to let anyone else flatten what it means.
