Kevin Bronson on January 8th, 2016

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For a while, we worried that Hutch Harris was going to do so well at stand-up comedy that there might not be another album from the Thermals. This week, though, his Twitter feed turned from yuks (Sample: “A bunch of weird bearded white dudes holed up in a cabin in rural Oregon, uh they’re probably just making a record for Sub Pop”) to music, as the Portland trio announced that their seventh album, “We Disappear,” would be out March 25 via Saddle Creek. The trio of Harris, Kathy Foster and Westin Glass made the new album with producer Chris Walla (ex-Death Cab for Cutie), and it will come out 10 years after the very prescient “The Body, the Blood, the Machine,” an album that imagined the U.S. run by religious zealots. As with that album, there’s no shortage of grist for Harris’ lyrical mill on the new release, which he describes as being obsessed about technology, love and death. The first single “Hey You” bristles with the Thermals’ familiar melodic punk-rock, with Harris shout-singing about how the Grim Reaper is hot on his heels. At just 2 1/2 minutes, it’s almost a musical meme. “We’re trying to preserve our life digitally so when we’re gone people won’t forget us,” Harris says. “We’re using technology to become immortal. You can even set up Facebook and Twitter accounts to continue updating after you die! ‘We Disappear’ is about how humans fight the inevitable.”

||| Stream: “Hey You”