Jacob Charlton Drives Thornhill to Sleep Token Arena Tour
Jacob Charlton says sleep token gave Thornhill a bigger room to play in. The Melbourne band appeared on Sleep Token’s sold-out U.S. arena tour after the release of BODIES, which won an ARIA award last year.
Melbourne to arena stages
Thornhill started out as school kids in Melbourne 10 years ago, and Charlton has spent much of that run pushing the band beyond a narrow metal lane. He said Thornhill likes to do its own videos and its own clothing, and prefers to stay involved in every step of the process.
That control sits alongside a bigger live profile now. BODIES followed The Dark Pool in 2019 and Heroine in 2022, and the latest record pushed Thornhill onto a sold-out U.S. arena bill with Sleep Token. For a band that built its identity by doing things its own way, that pairing is a visible upgrade in scale.
Charlton on writing
Charlton also made clear he does not want Thornhill’s songs flattened into simple explanations. “I hate it when people ask me what one of my songs is about.” He added, “I hate it. It makes my blood boil. It just feels so lazy. If you want to find out what a song means, you should read the lyrics for yourself!”
He said the band fed lyric sheets into ChatGPT twice for a track-by-track breakdown request. “We’ve actually done that twice,” he said. “I’m absolutely against every facet of AI, but I did find it funny to see this computer try to explain what I’d written, which is never really on that surface level of, ‘I love this person,’ or, ‘I hate that thing,’ and has me creating a lot of my own metaphors.”
BODIES and the next push
Charlton tied Thornhill’s growth to resistance as much as approval. “Probably because people said it’s what we shouldn’t do,” he said of the band’s metallic edge. That instinct has carried from The Dark Pool to Heroine and into BODIES, which Kerrang! described as the sexiest album of last year and which brought home the ARIA win.
His ambition is now explicit. “It’s about getting as much as we can get. In 10 years’ time, we want to be a household name,” he said. For Thornhill, the immediate read is simple: an ARIA-winning band that still controls its image, still argues with expectations, and is now playing arenas to Sleep Token’s audience while it keeps building its own.
