Watch: A New Chapter In The Roachian Thesis

“That’s what excites me about surfing — doing it in a way that maybe I haven’t done before.”

Which is to say: Harrison Roach remains unconvinced by finality.

Bad Things Come in Three dropped today — a new film by Finlay Woods, released on NobodySurf. Ten minutes. Three boards. One Roach. Shot across Indo. Almost certainly healthier than whatever else you were planning to feed your brain today.

Harrison is an oddity in surfing — not just for his ability, but for his refusal to congeal into anything fixed. He won the WSL longboard title in 2022, but he rides whatever the conditions, mood, or metaphysics require. “It’s a weird scene,” he says of surfing. 

Lately, he’s been flirting with thrusters. We asked if the rumours were true.
“Fucking oath I have been,” he said. “I’ve been getting some really mean thrusters lately. I’m absolutely loving them.”

He might be the best generalist surfing has — a technical polyglot with no doctrine to sell. For proof, revisit The Mysterious Affair, where we handed the longboard world champ four high-performance blades, pointed at the ocean, and said, go on then. He did.

The new film extends the Roachian thesis: fluency without allegiance. A single fin, a twin, a thruster. Indo as test site. “You can take a board and ask how it wants to be ridden,” he says. “Or you can just fucking force it to do what you want. I’ve done both. Both are really fun, actually.”

A man fluent in every dialect, unsure which one to speak. Watch above.