The Thirsty Giants spent one weekend in October tracking their first proper full-length. The night before they started, they played almost the entire album live at a Mankato venue. The next morning they walked into the Average Grum recording space and ran through 11 of the 12 songs, most of them done in two or three takes. They went home, watched a horror movie, slept, came back the following day and finished the last song. Vocals and gang vocals went down that afternoon at the engineer’s home setup. “And that was it,” says drummer David Perron.
That speed is most of the story behind “Escape the Junkyard,” out May 29th on Round Bale Recordings, the label Perron runs, which is tied to the Free Form Freakout radio show and podcast. It’s the band’s vinyl debut and the first release they’d call a real album, after a run of self-recorded EPs, live tapes, and singles caught in varying degrees of questionable fidelity.
The Thirsty Giants are an intergenerational trio. David Perron plays drums; his son Holden plays guitar and sings. The two started the band in 2022 out of lockdown-era basement jam sessions, working through half-remembered versions of Black Flag, The Stooges, Circle Jerks, Rudimentary Peni, and Dead Moon before Holden began writing his own songs. They played out as a duo a handful of times over about five months. Bassist Hunter Theisen joined after his and Holden’s short-lived garage rock band fell apart. Perron is blunt about the lineup: Theisen, he says, “is far more musically gifted than either of us.”
Holden wrote roughly two thirds of the album while away at college. When he came back to Mankato in May 2025, he and his father worked out the structure and arrangements, and the band played a few local shows that month. They cut rough demos and sent them to Theisen. Holden then went back to Duluth, where he kept writing, trading video clips and voice memos with David to sort out parts. The three of them now live in different cities: Mankato, Minneapolis, and Duluth.
Toward the end of summer they asked Mark Krogmann, a local musician and engineer, to record and mix the record. They’d liked his mix on a live recording of theirs and wanted someone relaxed to work with. Every previous release had leaned on Theisen wearing every hat at once: recording, mixing, playing bass, singing. With a date set for late October, the pressure landed. “We realized we needed to get our shit together pretty quickly,” Perron says.
They rehearsed at friends’ practice spaces in Minneapolis (Perron shouts out Mary Jam and Ray Gun Youth), tightened the songs, and watched Theisen get up to speed fast and put his stamp on much of it. Two days of rehearsal on October 22nd and 23rd, the live show on the 24th, then the tracking the morning after.
One track broke the pattern. “Disperse” started as a loose, semi-improvised piece built on a bass line of Theisen’s. Krogmann, also a strong bass player, added a part to it, and it became the only recording done outside that October weekend. The band had jokingly called it “Marked and Hunted” along the way, pun intended. Krogmann’s contribution is the part they all point to.
The last thing they recorded wasn’t a song. A train runs through the start and end of the album, caught on a Tascam handheld behind a Mankato record store where Holden and David have both worked over the years. Trains move through the town constantly, especially at night.
Musically the album leans harder into classic punk/hardcore territory, plenty of melodic hooks, but also blunt hardcore punk speed and weight than the band’s earlier stuff, with moodier, sludgier stretches sitting alongside it. The lyrics run grim in places, which Perron calls close to unavoidable right now, though there’s dark humor threaded through songs looking out at a world full of violence, war, greed, addiction, and assholes.
Holden Perron plays guitar and sings; Theisen plays bass and adds guitar on “Disperse” and “Cracked Egg”; David Perron drums and sings backup. Krogmann recorded and mixed, sang backing vocals, and played the extra bass on “Disperse.” Ali Jaafar mastered the album at Ecstattic Studio, and Matt Irwin did the artwork. The LP is limited to 200 copies pressed on recycled black PVC at Outta Wax in Minneapolis, in a single-pocket jacket with a two-sided insert carrying lyrics and photos.
Catch the band at this year’s Caterwaul and be sure to check our huge feature about the festival here.
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