Haim do their best Guns N’ Roses impression on the whip-cracking “Feel The Thunder” from the upcoming The Croods: A New Age soundtrack. The hair metal anthem features all the hallmarks of classic-era GNR: the rumbling drum intro, the “huh” grunt, snarling vocals, the slow build to an explosive chorus with big guitar action and a juicy, juicy solo or two.
The hair metal homage produced by Ariel Rechtshaid, who singer Danielle Haim told Rolling Stone made perfect sense. “[Ariel] is obsessed with them,” Haim said. “He went and saw them on their most recent tour a bunch of times. And so I figured that that’s what we were looking for. We were like, ‘Let’s get Ariel.’ But I’d never tried to make music like that before, so it was fully like a crazy experiment.”
Haim wrote he song specifically for the film that opens on Nov. 25 as a theme song for the Thunder Sisters, even recording live-sounding drums with the kind of echo effect you would have heard on GNR’s iconic 1987 smash Appetite for Destruction. “We grew up listening to rock music, pop, a healthy smattering of a ton of different kinds of music,” Danielle added. “I don’t know how often you really hear rock music in a kid’s film anymore, or rock music in general anymore.”
The group worked on the song with the film’s composer former Devo leader Mark Mothersbaugh, who called them “very talented ladies who are very fun to work with.”
Listen to “Feel the Thunder” below.
