Gary Suarez, writing at Pitchfork, speaks with Geoff Rickly of Thursday on “surviving” Martin Shkreli. This is the first time I’ve seen Geoff publicly mention that Collect Records was originally going to put out that The Hotelier album:
We would talk about bands. He brought me the Hotelier. I didn’t know them, they were sort of a buzzy band already. But he was super into them. He was always like you’re not signing enough bands. For me, the situation was so good that I didn’t want to lose it. I probably should have pressured him to put more money into each band.
And:
I met with the Hotelier about their record, which is so good. I thought, “This is the record that could save our label, it’s so good. There’s this one song on it that’s so much better than the rest of the record that we finally have a single—a real single.” And they were like, “We can’t do it.” That meeting, I felt like somebody punched me in the stomach. And I didn’t feel like they were betraying me. I just felt like I was understanding there’s no saving it. This is it. This is done.