Toronto-based enigma ThxSoMch has shared an impressive debut album, The Sound Of You Laughing. He takes Wonderland behind the music, one track at a time.
Angst is SO in right now. And Tornoto-based punk troubadour ThxSoMch is as angsty as they come. The rising talent’s Atlantic Records-released debut LP, The Sound Of You Laughing, is a raw, broody and at times anthemic piece of work, made in complete isolation from the world he previously knew. He embarked, alongside producer grayskies, on a seven-month trip to Brazil, pouring his soul into his art.
The results reap reward. He doesn’t sing – he bites, screeches, snaps, gasps, bursting with character and authenticity. The album is remarkably confident and well-rounded for a debut, cultivated by the particular process in which it was made. So how did he put the project together? The artist himself reveals all below, in our latest track-by-track.
Listen to the album…
Read the track-by-track…
“Would You?”
This was the first full song that my producer, grayskies, and I made for the album. We were kind of blown away because neither of us had ever made anything like it. The song truly embodies mania and overthinking.. lyrically it’s about that, but the process of making it was, too. The version we finally sent to be mixed was version 44. We spent months fine-tuning every detail, it was such a pain in the ass.
“Sound Of You Laughing”
This became the title track because the name just sat with me for months and its meaning evolved in my head. Initially, it was just a witty play on a love song—the idea that you need someone else to the point where you’d go insane without them. But the title, The Sound of You Laughing, has a dual meaning that captures the whole album’s energy. On the one hand, laughter can be like a cigarette. A release, something freeing. On the other, it can be the sound of someone mocking you. The album has this manic energy that can be directed outwardly at others, but also right back at yourself, and I feel like the title represents that perfectly.
“Awfully Sad”
The inspiration here came from a very specific place. I was obsessed with the song “Orbitron” by Duster, just because it has this guitar tone in it that’s so abrasive and loud. And traditionally, people would maybe have a hard time listening to it because it’s so noisy, but I loved it so much. I showed the song to grayskies and we decided to build a track from the ground up with that abrasive nature in mind. In the end, it turned out a little sweeter than we planned, but it still has those core abrasive elements. This one has really grown on me, and I think it’s going to be a big mosh pit song at the shows. I can’t wait to perform it.
“I’ll Love Who I’ll Love”
This was the only track made from one of grayskies’ beats that he had posted on YouTube. I made it back in March 2024, just by pulling up the beat on my phone and riffing a melody that became the chorus. It was very quick. At the time, it didn’t feel similar to the music I was releasing, but it stuck with me for over a year. All my previous music with grayskies, like ‘SPIT IN MY FACE!’ was done on YouTube beats before we ever met in person. Having this one track on there keeps a little bit of that old soul in the project.
“Keep It To Yourself”
This is definitely one of my favourites. We made it at a studio in Brazil that we weren’t used to, and we were feeling anxious and kind of stuck in a writer’s block. We decided to go outside, smoke, and just have fun with it. When we went back in, grayskies started playing this really cool, syncopated chord progression on the guitar. I started vocally matching his strumming pattern, just making sounds. For weeks, we’d had this running joke where one of us would throw out a song idea and the other would just say, “You can keep that to yourself.” We realized we should just use our inside joke for the song. It fit perfectly, and we turned a stupid joke into one of my favourite tracks on the album.
“Unhinged”
This one has a weird history. I wrote the first verse back in March 2023 and just left it as a voice recording on my phone. I never did anything with it. When I started making the album in late 2024, I went through old ideas and decided to finally record it, though I didn’t think much of it. Then we posted a clip from a random account and it just went crazy and kind of became a fan favourite unexpectedly. People were pressuring me to finish it while I was deep in the rest of the album and the inspiration just wasn’t there because I was so focused on everything else. Once the album was done, I reevaluated it and sent it to my friend, the producer LMG. He’s super talented and figured out the production right away. We finished it up and it became the very last song added to the album.
“Everyone Dies In A Costume”
This one’s kind of funny because the inspiration came from scrolling on YouTube and finding a video montage of the movie Kick-Ass. The movie is about regular people who dress up as superheroes and try to fight crime, but they’re just normal guys. In one clip, someone yells, “You’re gonna die in that stupid fucking costume!” or something like that. That line and concept just hit me. It’s a crazy message about someone pretending to be someone they’re not, taking it so far that they effectively kill the person they really are. I held onto that idea and built the whole song around it.
“A Sharp Pain”
This is literally the fastest I have ever made a song in my life. From the moment we started to the version you hear now, grayskies and I made the entire thing in an hour and 45 minutes. Some songs on this album took weeks. For this one, grayskies started with the drums, then began playing random guitar melodies. He glossed over the melody you hear in the final song, and I had to stop him and say, “Wait, no, play that again.” The lyrics came to me super quickly, and everything just clicked. It’s another one of my favourites, and I am so fucking hyped to play this one live.
“No!”
Originally, this one was just an interlude. This track started as a 20-minute experiment at the end of a session where we were completely stuck. We were listening to The Prodigy and decided to just mess around with a breakbeat for the last 20 minutes we had. I was on a handheld mic, and we just laid down a bunch of stuff. After a few months went by, we realised it could be a full song.
To me, it feels like a scene from The Simpsons where Homer clicks the wrong button at the nuclear plant he works at and the red lights and sirens go off. The song is just about sounding the alarms. It comes right after ‘A Sharp Pain’ which is about free-flowing, intrusive thoughts. ‘No!’ is the moment right after, when you catch yourself and think “that’s not right”.
“Bad Dream”
I really wanted to make a high-energy song with a hooky, surfy guitar line. The lyrics, though, are quite literal. While making the album in Brazil, I was staying at different hotels every visit. The one I was in while we made this song had construction happening in the room right next to mine, starting at 7 or 8 a.m. every morning. We were working late, so I was getting no sleep. I was on maybe two hours of sleep a night and felt like I was actually going crazy. The lyrics are pretty much written exactly about that experience.
“Hide And Seek (interlude)”
This one was all grayskies. I showed up at his apartment one day and he played me this instrumental he had made. It was super ominous and eerie, like the sound of someone creeping up on you. I loved what grayskies made, and we knew we had to put it on the album as an interlude. It serves as a great transition and tells a story all on its own.
“Uno Uno Uno”
This was the very first song idea we worked on when we first met, though we didn’t finish it for months. grayskies said he felt the album needed a moment of self-reflection—a point where, in between all the manic energy, you just sit down and are alone with your thoughts. We realised this song was the perfect vessel for that. A lot of the ambient parts you hear were actually happy accidents grayskies stumbled upon while moving things around. This is the moment in the album of pure self-reflection.
“Aim For The Bushes”
We made this one in a totally different way. We were just jamming during our first trip together—grayskies was on guitar and I was on the drums, which I grew up playing. He started playing this crazy, distorted guitar line. I pulled out my phone and he just kept riffing that line and I just started laying down random stuff into my phone. And then since that song started with me playing the drums and him playing the guitar, we ended up doing that in that song. So I’m actually playing the drums in the final track.
The lyrics are super personal to me. When I was writing them, I could feel the emotion in me, and every time I rehearse it, I feel it again. Those ones hit hard.
