'The Setting Sun is Everywhere': Thrice's Dustin Kensrue on Politics, Religion and 'Horizons/West'
Monday, 09 March 2026
Written by Matt Mills
Photo: Atiba Jefferson
Dustin Kensrue has been thinking about endings. Now 45, the singer-guitarist of South California rockers Thrice has entered that culturally dreaded period known as “middle age”, where the kids are starting to leave for college and he’s seeing people around him get diagnosed with cancer. “At this age, everybody is thinking about death or running away from thinking about death,” he tells me on a video call from his home in Orange County.
Kensrue could easily have taken the latter option and buried his head in the sand. Instead, together with his bandmates of more than two decades, he wrote ‘Horizons/West’: a new album about finality, conveyed through the metaphor of the sunset. Each song alludes to the western horizon, where the light fades every day, in the same way that 2021’s ‘Horizons/East’ referenced the sunrise and new beginnings.
“The setting sun is everywhere on this record,” Kensrue confirms. “But I let it be loose, in the sense of not having it always mean the same thing. In certain songs, this setting sun, this ending, is something that’s hard and scary; in other ones, it’s welcomed and needed. Obviously, death and mortality play into that. Ageing. But sometimes, something is just awful and it needs to end.”
It’s hard to get at Kensrue’s feelings on these subjects by talking to him. A well-read man who’s pulled lyrics from the Bible, Dune and many texts in between, he often defers to philosophy or existentialism when faced with a personal question. “I think the fear of death hides in a bunch of other anxieties we have,” he says when I ask if he’s experienced death firsthand in the lead-up to this record.
But, as stoic as he is in person, Kensrue unloads plenty on ‘Horizons/West’. The Dark Glow addresses death with sorrow, as the frontman admits over gloomy acoustic guitar, “A cold, quiet dread is creeping through my head and carving hexes in my skull.” Albatross laments toxic relationships (“They keep on telling me our stars are crossed / but I think you might be my albatross”), even though Kensrue’s been happily married for years. Other tracks – especially Crooked Shadows and the sweeping, gorgeous Vesper Light – are brazen political statements, lambasting the rise of fascism in Trump’s America.
Kensrue wrote the lyrics to ‘Horizons/West’ around the time of Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. In line with the album’s theme of endings, he hopes that the kind of hate spewed by the current administration is going through an extinction burst: one last uptick before it disappears forever. “It’s concerning and it’s scary,” he says. “Crooked Shadows leans into the idea that, hopefully, this is the flare-up before it’s gone. There’s been such a swell of insensitive, unloving, uncaring sentiments out there, and it’s a bummer.”
Thrice – rounded out by lead guitarist Teppei Teranishi, drummer Riley Breckenridge and his bassist brother Eddie – grew up in the Democratic stronghold of California, and ‘Horizons/West’ is far from the first time they’ve got political. Don’t Tell and We Won’t Ask, from their 2003 breakthrough ‘The Artist in the Ambulance’, savages military hypocrisy, and 2016’s Death from Above questions the morality of drone warfare. But, they’ve never been as confrontational as Rage Against the Machine or Napalm Death.
Kensrue, for example, has compassion for people on the other side of the fence. “The political machine has been weaponised to make them feel like they have no choice,” he observes. “I know that shouting at people and telling them that they’re evil is not going to open them up to rethinking their ideas, because they don’t feel evil. I would make an exception for the actual federal officers who are enacting fascism on our streets, but as far as the everyday person, that’s not going to help.”
Kensrue’s belief in nudging people towards change comes from experience. He was a firm Calvinist Christian – “which generally means you’re a bit more of an asshole,” he says – until, during Thrice’s hiatus in the early-to-mid 2010s, his worldview deconstructed. His transition from conservative religious views to process theology, which rejects the idea of an infallible God, occurred after he resigned from the Mars Hill Church following allegations against its founder, Mark Driscoll.
“I had multiple points in my life where I had this kind of crisis of faith, like, ‘Something here doesn’t make sense,’” he remembers. “It was hard for my family. I do a lot of internal processing and was not communicating where I was going. After the Mars Hill stuff, I really had the freedom to dig back into looking at inerrancy, and in that freedom, I realised, ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s right at all.’”
Kensrue isn’t certain that he can answer life’s big questions, but ‘Horizons/West’ shows he still finds comfort in spirituality. “Spirit hides between the glamoured grip of words,” goes the opening line of the opening song, Blackout. The Dark Glow asks, “But what if all we thought was darkness was instead the truest light?” Lines such as these tie into a broader sense of hope that runs throughout the record: Distant Suns argues that just one glimmer can guide people through blackness. Everything ends, but that’s not always a bad thing.
I ask Kensrue what powers him through the bleak times, and as well as his family, it’s creating. Thrice have always been a “fuck you, we’ll write the music we want” kind of band, which Kensrue attributes to their formative days in the SoCal punk scene. After mining post-hardcore gold and hitting the US top 20 with ‘The Artist in the Ambulance’, they pursued a post-rock tangent on ‘Vheissu’ and baffled their major-label bosses. For them, commercial viability will always take a backseat to artistic integrity.
“The same thing has always driven us, since the first time we were in a room trying to write a song,” says Kensrue. “There’s an excitement in combining things that you haven’t heard before together and the energy that it makes. It’s satisfying because it’s an internal motivation: it’s not motivated by, ‘What is someone going to think about this thing?’ That kind of motivation is always much less powerful and less sustaining.”
In that vein, Kensrue already knows what’s next for Thrice. The band are touring to promote ‘Horizons/West’ — with a run of European shows kicking off soon before UK dates in Cardiff, Manchester, Glasgow, Nottingham, Birmingham and London — but their frontman has the outline for their next “project” in his head. He’s also got another solo album, the follow-up to 2024’s ‘Desert Dreaming’, in the works. Death may be on Dustin Kensrue’s mind, but he’s got a lot of stuff to do before he’s ready for it to come knocking.
Thrice’s ‘Horizons/West’ is out now through Epitaph.
Thrice Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Fri March 13 2026 - CARDIFF Tramshed
Sat March 14 2026 - MANCHESTER O2 Ritz
Sun March 15 2026 - GLASGOW SWG3 Galvanizers Yard
Tue March 17 2026 - NOTTINGHAM Rock City
Wed March 18 2026 - BIRMINGHAM O2 Institute
Thu March 19 2026 - LONDON O2 Forum Kentish Town
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