Tonight at a concert in Albany, NY, post-hardcore luminaries Thursday debuted their first new single since 2011. It’s called “Application For Release From The Dream,” and it’s online now, 13 years to the day since the release of 2011’s No Devolución. It’s also the first Thursday song with Norman Brannon, ex-Texas Is The Reason, on guitar, and the first one in 25 years without a record label. The song is a sort of thundering emo power ballad with post-rock tendencies that might inspire people to raise their lighters en route to its shout-along finale: “What is life? A spark. What is death? A moment.” It gets real gnarly there for a few seconds, too — a deeply satisfying disruption in an otherwise gracefully gliding behemoth of a song.

Thursday morning, Thursday shared this message announcing the new single:

Tonight we release our first song in 13 years. It’s also our first release in 25 years WITHOUT a record label. That’s 25 years since we set out in a small white van to play basements and VFW Halls — attics, kitchens and back yards — with a bunch of burned CDRs marked in black Sharpie: “Summer Tour ’99.” In those 25 years, there were so many highway breakdowns, so many emergency rooms, run-ins with the law. So much time laughing in the studio, so many hours huddled together backstage or loading gear in the rain. And yes, 25 years of legal disputes and public blowouts. But now we are free. Free to make our own mistakes. Free to turn this band into whatever we dream it to be, whether we want to make it a collective of rotating members, a small cottage industry, a publishing house, a record label, or just a group of friends still having fun together after all these years. So tonight we step on stage at a tiny independent venue like we would’ve played when we were releasing Full Collapse (23 years ago this week) or again when we released No Devolucion (13 years ago this week). The kind of place we hope we get to keep playing at for as long as they’ll have us. Because no matter the size of the stages we’ve played in those 25 years, we remain— at heart — a small band, a bunch of kids still screaming in a basement. But we’re your small band and we love you. Thanks for everything. We’ll see you at midnight, in your time zone. “It’s just a moment now.”

In the time since the last new Thursday music, Geoff Rickly has released multiple albums with the excellent side projects United Nations and No Devotion and released his debut novel, the autofiction epic Someone Who Isn’t Me. Last year, he sat down for a fantastic We’ve Got A File On You.

Hear “Application For Release From The Dream” below.