Thrice

Thrice formed in Irvine, California in 1998, born out of teenage friendships and shared musical ambition. The group was founded by guitarist/vocalist Dustin Kensrue and lead guitarist Teppei Teranishi while they were in high school. Kensrue and Teranishi knew each other from school and had played in a band called Chapter 11, and Teppei recruited his skate park friend Eddie Breckenridge to play bass, who then brought his brother Riley on as a drummer. The band's name itself came together almost by accident, as in 1998, before their first show, they realized they needed a name, and hard-pressed for time, they decided to go with the name Thrice out of desperation, initially intending it only for that first show. Early on, the band self-released their debut, and by working with Death by Stereo's Paul Miner, the quartet recorded 12 tracks and by April 2000 had self-released the Identity Crisis LP , a raw hardcore punk effort that caught the ear of local labels.

The band's breakthrough arrived with a rapid ascent from underground favorites to major-label rock band. After signing with Hopeless/Sub City, their second album, The Illusion of Safety (2002), was widely acclaimed and received attention from major record labels, even though Thrice's music had always included metal influences. That attention led to a deal with Island Records, and in 2003 the band released what is widely regarded as its defining record. The Artist in the Ambulance is the third studio album by Thrice, released July 22, 2003 through Island Records, becoming their first release on a major label. The album delivered the band's commercial peak, as The Artist in the Ambulance debuted in the Top 20 on Billboard's Top 200, and the single "All That's Left" was all over modern rock radio that summer. Throughout this era the lineup remained rock solid, consisting of Dustin Kensrue (vocals and guitar), Teppei Teranishi (guitar, keys), Eddie Breckenridge (bass), and Riley Breckenridge (drums) , a unit that would remain unchanged for the band's entire history.

Rather than chase the same sound twice, Thrice spent the following decade restlessly reinventing itself. Their fourth album Vheissu (2005) made significant changes by incorporating electronic beats, keyboards, and a more experimental sound , and this experimentation reached its height with The Alchemy Index, consisting of two studio albums released in 2007 and 2008 that together make a four-part, 24-song cycle built around the elements of fire, water, air, and earth. The band's seventh album, Beggars, was released on August 11, 2009, and their eighth, Major/Minor, on September 20, 2011. Facing burnout, the band went on an indefinite hiatus following a spring 2012 farewell tour , only to return a few years later; they reunited in 2015, returning more popular than ever, as their 2016 album To Be Everywhere Is To Be Nowhere quickly became their highest-charting release to date. Throughout their career the band also toured alongside acts like Brand New, Coheed and Cambria, Hot Water Music, and Poison the Well, and one consistent thread has run through every release: each album released by Thrice has had a portion of its sales proceeds donated to a new charitable organization. Thrice remains active and creatively ambitious more than 25 years after forming. The band's tenth album, Palms, was released in 2018, and their eleventh studio album Horizons/East was released in September 2021. They followed that with a companion record, as Horizons/West, the twelfth studio album by Thrice, was released on October 3, 2025, via Epitaph in LP, CD and digital formats. The band supported the release with a nationwide headline tour that fall, joined by Modern Color and Downward, kicking off October 17 in San Diego and wrapping up November 23 in Anaheim. Across a career defined by constant sonic reinvention, from hardcore beginnings to post-hardcore, art rock, and ambient experimentation, Thrice has earned a reputation as one of the most consistently evolving and respected bands to emerge from the early-2000s Orange County scene, influencing a generation of post-hardcore and alternative rock acts that followed.

For this archive, Thrice occupies a modest but meaningful place in Wayne Dennon's collection. Wayne photographed the band at one show back in 2006, right in the thick of their most experimental and prolific creative stretch, and the 12 photographs from that night remain part of the site's permanent record. In the years since, those images have drawn steady attention from visitors, with photos of Thrice viewed 9,382 times, a quiet testament to both the band's enduring fanbase and to Wayne's eye for capturing a group that never stopped changing shape.