Thrice is one of the best bands going. With their latest release Beggars, the band’s seventh studio album, they further establish themselves as a band who doesn’t allow its sound to grow complacent. Fresh off the experimental The Alchemy Index, Thrice has refocused itself on groove. Recorded in their garage studio, Beggars sounds like an album created in a garage. The songs are organic, as full of energy and enthusiasm as the oil stains and the tent-that-hasn’t-been-used-in-years intimacies of the garage they started out in. After The Artist in the Ambulance Thrice could have eased into being the next At The Drive-In and made a solid career of it. But you hear “In Exile” and it sounds more like Coldplay if they had balls. Dustin Kensrue is as deft a songwriter as he is a conveyer of what he’s trying to say; he can still scream with the best of them, as songs like “At The Last” and “Talking Through Glass” prove, yet his voice can just as easily hypnotize you with the stellar “Circles.” As brilliant—and career daring—as The Alchemy Index was to try, the formulaic, element-to-element inspired structure of each EP left the band with little leeway to gain any sustained momentum. There are TAI fingerprints all over Beggars, but it has a momentum, a sustained groove uniformity to it that hasn’t been seen on any other Thrice release. “Doublespeak” isn’t a song they would have—or probably could have—written five years ago. Long since having traded in the soaring Guitar Hero worthy solos of The Illusion of Safety and The Artist in the Ambulance for the more textured rhythms they’ve rocked since Vheissu, Thrice is more accessible band for it, and Beggars is that rare album that diehards will devour, and newbies will be drawn into. The boarlike riff of the album’s first single “All the World is Mad” shows they can still bring it—and shows they still have a little ATDI “Arcarsenal” hardcore action left in them—but the follow-up “The Weight” will appeal to the Radiohead heads everywhere. Thrice isn’t quite recognized in the Radiohead pantheon. But Beggars shows that they probably should be.