“Fly on the Wall” by Thousand Foot Krutch, Wednesday, August 23, 2023

 

In 2011, Thousand Foot Krutch announced that they would be leaving Tooth & Nail Records, releasing music independently. The band had released three LPs and re-released a reworked version of their breakthrough record Set It Off on the iconic label. Thousand Foot Krutch certainly wasn't the first band to leave the Tooth & Nail fold to become an independent artist, but doing so often was career suicide because before the 2010s, record labels served bands in marketing their music, pushing songs to radio, funding music videos, as well as a number of other promotional means of making a band as big as possible. 

I DON'T THINK I NEED YOU ANYMORE. In 2008, the website Indiegogo launched. A year later Kickstarter was launched.  These websites, while not the first of their kind, helped to popularize crowdsourcing, a business venture directly funded by patrons who promise funds in exchange for a product and often recognition for funding a new product. Bands started using crowdfunding to finance their projects, at first bypassing the record company. Rather than trying to meet the sales quota in order to make money on the record, bands could sell fewer copies and pocket the profit after paying expenses, rather than waiting for a complicated system in which the band got a check from the record company. So when some bands like Anberlin were signing to major labels, other bands like Thousand Foot Krutch, Project 86, and Falling Up decided to produce music independently. Producing music independently may have not propelled the Project 86 0r Falling Up to greater heights, but the move was very successful for Thousand Foot Krutch. 

WE HAD A PLAN TO BUILD A WALL. The eleven-year-old The End Is Where We Begin sold 23,000 units, peaking on Billboard 200 at number 14, the highest charting TFK record until their next album, Oxygen: Inhale two years later, which peaked at number 11. Furthermore, The End Is Where We Begin topped both the Hard Rock and Christian album charts. The band spawned active rock singles from their post-Tooth & Nail albums. However, the band had been on hiatus since 2016's Exhale. For me, I thought that TFK's final two records lacked the catchiness that made their Tooth & Nail career; however, The End Is Where We Begin is perhaps their best record. The band goes darker and is heavier than most of their records. They leaned into the heavier sound on their final record, but sacrificed catchiness. Today's song, "Fly on the Wall" is everything that we can expect from a Thousand Foot Krutch song. Lead singer Trevor McNevan delivers the lyrics passionately. The lyrics are slightly more cryptic than the usually weak Thousand Foot Krutch songs. The song deals with people who appear to be imprisoned, but in actuality are free and the prison is purely mental. There seem to be spiritual implications that the band signifies, but it also fits a rock 'n' roll anti-authority narrative as well. I'll be watching Thousand Foot Krutch in the upcoming months as they have announced a re-recording of The End Is Where We Begin. So far, they have released two tracks, "War of Change" and "Down," each featuring a different band accompanying Krutch. Will they continue to record the rest of the album with different artists?   

 

Read “Fly on the Wall” by Thousand Foot Krutch on Genius.