A City by the Light Divided is the fourth full-length album by Thursday, released by Island Records on May 2, 2006. It reached #20 on The Billboard 2001. Vocalist Geoff Rickly comments on the album's intent: I think it was, "How do we keep the urgency and the excitement of what Thursday's doing?", which to me has always been a chemistry kind of thing, like the way the band fits together and pops into place and stuff. How do we do that but make it more multi-dimensional? We didn't focus at all. We put anything we were mildly interested in there and said, "Let's juxtapose this into the mix." So we ended up with big sort of ballads that were almost like U2 and some grindcore stuff and some really blasty, screamy shit, and other stuff...I would love to leave some sort of legacy. But I just want to get to a place where we're not living or dying by the trends. There's a few bands in every genre that don't leave the genre, don't say "we're not doing this anymore" but kind of outlast it. I would really like to be the Sonic Youth of our scene. That would be really rad. —Geoff Rickly, Prior to the album's release, in Fall 2005, five Thursday demo songs were stolen from My American Heart's tour manager's iPod. Rickly had recently collaborated with My American Heart on the track "We Are the Fabrication" for their album The Meaning in Makeup. The band issued a statement on their official website stating that they were disappointed the unfinished products leaked, but that they were glad t