Full Circle

When founding bassist Jason Thirsk took his own life in 1996, it was much more than a personal loss for the members of Pennywise. Thirsk’s suicide was an affront to everything Pennywise stood for; from the band's beginning, perseverance had been one of its principal messages, and with Thirsk the members had written multiple songs denouncing suicide and the destruction of self. Hence, Full Circle—the first Pennywise album without Thirsk—was perhaps the most crucial moment of its career. With its faith in its ideals challenged, the band refused to submit to doubt, instead delivering an album about the absolute necessity of valuing life and living it to its fullest. Almost every song presents a vision of a cruel world and then insists that we confront it with unity, courage, and above all, persistence. Jim Lindberg appears riddled by confusion and despair on “Every Time” and “What If I,” but the overarching message is in the final words of “Get a Life”: “Fight on with all your might.” The album closes with a reprisal of Pennywise's classic song “Bro Hymn,” now dedicated to Thirsk. It's an elegy fueled not by self-pity or sentimentality but raw fraternal release.