IF YOU WERE an internationally successful mid-00s band, chances are you were featured on The OC at some stage between 2003 and 2007.
Indie staples like The Killers, The Dandy Warhols, Jet, Doves, The Futureheads all got their tunes on OC soundtracks – meaning an automatic acceleration of popularity.
And then there were Dublin band The Thrills.
They played three songs in total in a season two episode – actually popping up on stage in The Bait Shop
This wasn’t just background music.
Saturday Night, Not For All The Love In The World and (just about) The Curse of Comfort were belted out on stage
The camera pans away from their performance after about 30 seconds while Alex and Seth have a raging argument, and Lindsay gets locked – but cuts back to the lads intermittently
At the time, getting on The OC soundtrack – and actually appearing in an episode to boot – had everyone in Ireland at the time expecting the Thrills to blow up in the States. They were promoting their second album Let’s Bottle Bohemia, but things just never took off for them after that – the album peaking at 152 in the Billboard charts.
It took around three years to release their third album Teenager, and Conor Deasy explained to Under The Radar in 2007 that the songs they were writing just didn’t hit the level they wanted:
We wrote about 30 songs for this album, and a lot of the songs we discarded. They weren’t poor songs. They were perfectly good songs, but they were songs that could have fit on the first or the second album a little too easily.
We didn’t really have the difficult second album. We had the difficult third album, I suppose.
Teenager didn’t ignite the charts, and the band worked together for the last time just one year later, having been dropped from their label.
Irish people can still remember that buzz of excitement when they showed up on The OC though
PLAY SANTA CRUZ.
For Americans rewatching The OC today, they’re discovering The Thrills and wondering why the show’s magic wand didn’t work with them
But for any fan of So Much For The City and their subsequent work, The Thrills popping up in The Bait Shop will always be a highlight
In total, they had five different songs over various episodes of The OC – so the producers were huge fans at the very least.
Good times.
