Pennsylvania droner Planning for Burial plays the quiet part loud in Orlando this week

Thom Wasluck is always building something. When he’s not working in construction, he’s Planning for Burial — the stage name for his one-man band — or at least thinking about it.

“When we’re at crazy power plants in the middle of beautiful farmland, there’s something about this industrial mess in the middle of it that I find very beautiful mixed together. I think that plays a lot into the music I make, too.”

The Wilkes-Barre native’s musical moniker is a tribute to a tragic event from his childhood: “I was just shy of 13 [when] my grandmother had a heart attack and, out of nowhere, died,” Wasluck says. “My grandfather got sick with cancer right after that, and he did not want treatment. He wanted off this planet.”

As someone who “seemed like the most stoic, hardened man ever,” such a decision was not to be taken lightly. Wasluck recalls watching his grandfather “go and pick out his own headstone,” which remains “one of the most brutal things [he’s] ever seen.” Building on this brutality, Thom laid the blueprints for his solo project in 2005, and he’s been Planning ever since.

One of Wasluck’s earliest listeners was Dan Barrett of Have a Nice Life, who started the label Enemies List Home Recordings in 2003 to distribute music for his own band and solo projects. “I was always on the Enemies List site early on, like 2007-08,” Wasluck tells Orlando Weekly. “And I posted my first album, Leaving, on there.” Building rapport with Barrett online, he later sent a copy of the album on CD to the label’s Connecticut headquarters. Enemies List released Leaving on a limited-edition CD in 2010, setting the foundation for Wasluck’s towering body of work.

From doom and drone to shoegaze and slowcore, the styles at play in Planning for Burial’s sound tend toward the somber end of the sonic spectrum. Wasluck’s signature blend of “very harsh, loud, breaking sound” with “a lot of melody” has damaged countless ears over the last 20 years, summoning shoegazers and headbangers alike to a near-deaf experience.

So what’s the method to the mashup? “I don’t know if I’ve ever actually had a process,” he says. “Sometimes I’m just playing guitar in the basement — a quick little phrase — I’ll loop it, run over to a drum kit and play along. It’s constantly changing.” Same story when it comes to the words: “Sometimes lyrics might not come for a year or two afterwards. Sometimes lyrics are the first thing, and I want to build something around them. It’s always different.”

Recalling an interview with Earth frontman and drone O.G. Dylan Carlson, Wasluck elaborates on the hallucinatory effects of sound repetition: “Even if you’re playing the same thing over and over, it kind of changes, too,” he says. “As you’re looping stuff — especially at a loud volume — your brain starts tricking you into thinking there’s other things happening that aren’t really happening.”

The project began when Wasluck lived in New Jersey, but its roots resurfaced during his pilgrimage to Pennsylvania. After leaving for college and meeting a girl, he worked in New York City until an opportunity in Wilkes-Barre led him back home. Returning to his old haunts over a decade later spawned the third Planning for Burial LP, Below the House, which Wasluck wrote and recorded alone in the basement of his youth.

Released in 2017 by San Francisco experimental label The Flenser, the album opens wide with “Whiskey and Wine,” a heavy nod to the spirits swirling through Wasluck’s headspace at the time. “It’s true, I couldn’t keep my hands off of you,” he wails through a wall of sound, concluding his message to the bottle with the confession, “I am weak.”

While Wasluck was straight-edge until his late 20s, he felt he was “missing out on a human experience” by abstaining from alcohol. “I didn’t take into consideration that alcoholism ran on both sides of my family for my grandparents,” he says. “And I went fucking hard for a couple years.”

Then came the pandemic. But instead of doubling down on drinking, Wasluck decided to quit (cold turkey, at that). Now going on five years sober, he’s back with a brand-new album and a summer filled with fresh tour dates. The first Planning for Burial full-length in eight years, It’s Closeness, It’s Easy features a few of the songs Wasluck played during his last Orlando stop at Will’s Pub in 2022 — but something tells us they’ll sound a little different this time.

Planning for Burial plays at Conduit this Wednesday, July 16, with support from i.liedtomyself and ISYA. Make your plans.

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This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2025.