Time Thieves/Photo: Tim Reynolds
My recommendations with regard to Chicago creation Time Thieves include cranking up their recordings to ear-bleeding range, and seeing them live (with earplugs handy). It’s not for nothing that the first song on their “Come Home” EP was called “Cover My Ears.” But I’m not advocating that practice.
Repeated listens reveal additional depth, and the earworms are frequently reeled in on fantastic hooks. When your chief complaint is “it’s over too soon,” even when two short works are put together, you know the group must be doing something right.
Time Thieves (whose naming was not inspired by the Dean Koontz novel, the 2018 film, or the 1981 film “Time Bandits,” termed a “classic” by Jonathan Pool, and a favorite of his stepmom, Laurinda) is comprised of Pool, who supplies guitars and vocals, synths and percussion, Tim Reynolds, also on guitar and vocals, Bensenville native, former Chicagoan, and current Wisconsinite Annie Saunders on bass and vocals, and Mustafa Daka on drums (convincingly propelling these mostly rocketing songs forward).
Pool started the band in 2015 with original drummer Mike Oberlin, and all of the members have a punk pedigree—between the quartet (and contributors) they’ve been in such bands as Sass Dragons, The Brokedowns, This is My Fist, Ambition Mission, Brickfight, Hospital Job, Horrible Things (and Daka has toured with Smoking Popes), to name only a few. Saunders, who joined the band in 2018, is also the founder of Punk House Chicago, in addition to being the director of veterinary medicine at the Humane Society in Sheboygan.
In 2025, Time Thieves released two EPs: one in May, titled “Come Home,” with a cover photo by Saunders and artwork by Reynolds, a former graphic designer for Champaign-Urbana indie record label Polyvinyl; and one in October, titled “If You Survive,” one song of which features guitarist John Polydoros (known from punk bands Off With Their Heads, The House That Gloria Vanderbilt, and Vacation Bible School).
Now the two EPs are being combined into one LP, released on vinyl for the first time this month. I have to know what prompted that “two EP” idea, and the execution.
The initial plan “was to work on an entire album’s worth of material,” Pool says now, but as “the songs started to be ‘complete,’ we wanted to just get them out into the world. My idea,” he admits, “was to put out a song every six weeks in perpetuity, forever, but that felt unceremonious and wasteful. We settled somewhere in the middle by splitting the material into two distinct EPs,” and then when “everything was done, rounding the entire project into an overarching album just felt like the thing to do.” He feels that the “songs have somewhat of a cathartic arc when listened to as a whole, so it felt right.”
Aside from “loud” (mostly), what do Time Thieves sound like? I ask him if the former punk in him and the current power-popper would be insulted to hear his band compared to Boston, Hüsker Dü, Weezer or Fountains Of Wayne. “Not at all,” he responds, “though I’ve definitely never heard the Boston comparison before! If that means catchy vocal melodies and screaming harmony guitar solos, brother, count me in.” Time Thieves cite early Weezer and The Rentals as inspirations, so I’m glad I’m not too far off base. After many spins I’m hearing moments that are reminiscent of Faliure (the band) and some that even approach Nirvana (the band).
Pool is okay about Time Thieves being called what he describes as guitar-driven power-pop “for fans of nineties rock who stopped listening to the radio after they discovered Propagandhi,” which he calls his “life story.”
And he’s also not wrong when he says that “nothing about this band is different structurally than the punk songs we’ve all written in our countless other bands over the years! The only difference here is that we’ve slowed them down and let them breathe a bit, and tried our best to sing nicely over them.” He admits that they “write our songs very simply for no other reason than to be able to focus more on our singing and vocal harmonies,” and he also says that “I’m not a very good guitar player, so the easier the better for me.” With Time Thieves, they are cognizant that they are “not trying to reinvent the wheel,” he adds, the group is “just trying to make it sound a little better as it winds down the road.”
Returning to the “cathartic arc” created when the two EPs were combined, Pool says that “Come Home” is meant to come across as a lighter, less “serious sounding” group of songs, “though all the songs themselves deal with heavier themes of personal loss, restlessness and internal conflict about the sorts of people we surround ourselves with as artists and musicians.” “The title track, though plaintive, is ultimately about contentment and joy in the realization that the concept of home has nothing to do with where one physically dwells.” Pool recounts that he wrote the song in 2024 while his then-fiancée (now wife) was traveling back and forth to Kentucky to help her mom recuperate from surgery. “It’s as much of a love song as I’ve ever written.” He feels that it ends the “Come Home” EP “on the positive note that the rest of the songs sound like they were meant to deliver (but never do).”
Time Thieves’ “If You Survive”
In contrast, Pool relates that the batch of songs on the “If You Survive” EP were “decidedly darker” and the autumnal release was meant to “lean into the coldness and despair [that] winter brings.” He came up with the title early in 2025—initially he was working on a batch of songs to incorporate into “a dystopian type of concept album.” He abandoned that idea “when I realized I didn’t need to do any more imagining about what living in a futuristic hellscape might look like—we live in one now.” To be specific, the song “Anymore” (with Daka on drums) is “essentially a first look into the world I was trying to create in that album. It was too depressing, especially as the year wore on.”
Pool recalls that by the time that Time Thieves “were gearing up to put the EP out, the ICE crackdowns in Chicago were at their most intense—and even calling it ‘If You Survive’ felt ‘overly provocative.’” He says he realizes “the great privilege we have to be able to put out silly songs on the internet and play shows with our friends in safe spaces, and I never want to take that for granted. ‘If You Survive’ as a phrase is meant as a welcome into the fold, not a message of divisiveness. It’s a ‘come find us when you make it here’ rather than a ‘good luck buddy, you’re gonna need it’ type of message.”
That erstwhile subtitled title cut “Dirge (If You Survive)” was an attempt “to blend that overall message with my own personal feelings about the loss and return of friends who have come and gone in my own life, both figuratively and literally. I considered it a dirge at the time as a way to mourn ex-friends who are, for lack of a better cliche, dead to me.”
The last track, “Offer What You May,” once again attempts to end the whole EP on an up note, as a sort of eulogy to the losses we’ve all suffered and are bound to further endure. The message? “Do what you can with what you have and leave the rest behind.”
Not only is it the shortest of the ten songs, but it’s also the only one performed solely on acoustic guitar. Pool says the song was written by his good friend Scott Witt, and the original demo he recorded was acoustic, and he “wanted to stay true to that.” Having said that, Pool promises that the digital release of the two EPs, which will be dropping on February 26, has “an extended version of the song that may surprise you.”
When asked the routine “what’s next?” question, Pool says that not only do they have plans for a music video, and a plan to perform “a bunch of shows regionally and beyond” to promote the current album, they already have more songs on the docket, and they hope to have another EP or LP worth of music “in the bank” before the end of 2026.
Time Thieves kick off what they are calling their “LP Release Winter Weekender,” celebrating the release of the combined EPs on vinyl (and digital) at Empty Bottle, 1035 North Western, on Thursday, February 26, with Josh Caterer Trio, Al Scorch (with a full band) and Earl Gary (featuring former members of Foul Tip, and Paper Mice, and Dream Goats) also on the bill. The doors open at 8pm; music begins at 9pm. The show is 21+ and tickets are $20.39 with all-in pricing, at emptybottle.com.
