Stick Men

As if being the year’s most dumb-foundingly good looking, hotly-tipped buzz band wasn’t enough, The Drums have made a storming debut that hurdles the hype. Lisa Wright finds a band on a mission to reclaim pop music…

As The Fly team sit waiting in a vast and dingy car park alongside Wolverhampton’s Civic Hall, surrounded by an array of monumental equipment vans and tour buses that could house a small Ethiopian village and watching the bizarre selection of Midlanders that are looking out expectantly for anyone they can pounce upon for an autograph, it’s clear just how far Brooklyn boys The Drums have come in their short career span. True, much of the fuss tonight is centred around the flame-haired siren that’s heading up the tour, but for a band that are, by anyone’s standards, still in their formative stages (“In a few days time it’s the one year anniversary of our first show” informs vocalist Jonathan Pierce), there’s a level of buzz that means even finding yourself in the same room as the four-piece becomes an almost military operation.
But then what do you expect with a group dubbed The Definitive Sound Of NOW, Most Likely To Conquer The Industry Whole and all manner of other hyperbolic, overbearing titles that find themselves bandied about whenever January rolls around? More than most bands, The Drums should be feeling the strain. But you get the idea that The Drums aren’t like most bands.
“We don’t really feel much of the pressure ‘cos were so busy,” shrugs Jonathan. “It’s really rewarding but we just haven’t had time to really even care what people think. And also a lot of bands get really hyped and then have the pressure to produce a perfect record whereas we were pretty much already done.”
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing that more people are hearing us,” continues guitarist Jacob Graham. “I think hype is just a negative word for attention; it’s like it’s unwarranted. People call you a buzz band, then they call you a hype band, then they call you a has been…” Well, if their current trajectory is anything to go by then the latter is certainly, it seems, a long way off the cards.
Formed just a year and a half ago by childhood friends Jonathan and Jacob, with Adam Kessler (guitar) and Connor Hanwick (drums) joining shortly after, the 60s indebted surf-pop troupe were borne from surprisingly incongruous beginnings; “Jake and I met at summer camp and bonded over electronic music. We were really obsessed with Kraftwerk, John Foxx and Giorgio Moroder – what kept our friendship going even though we weren’t in the same city was music and whenever either of us tried to make music, together or individually, it was always electronic. With The Drums, we had never even played guitars before…”
So did you learn specifically for the purpose of the band?
“Learn is probably the wrong word,” Jonathan laughs. “We just sort of… picked up guitars. It was really daunting to us. On the album and the EP it’s all one note at a time; there are no chords ‘cos it’s all we know how to do. It’s all Jake knows how to do, he can pretty much only play Drums songs!”
The pair glance at each other, laughing naturally like comfortable, close friends and not at all like the painfully cool, New York hipsters it’d be so easy to believe they were.
Sitting in the cramped quarters of their none-too-comfortable dressing room (“We work best in confined spaces,” they joke), the band are an intimidating proposition; immaculately dressed with model good looks, all four look like they’ve fallen out of some kind of debauched American Apparel advert, haunted with the rock’n'roll air of the night before but still somehow managing to exude about three hundred times more magnetism than anyone else in a five-mile radius – and yep, Florence is just downstairs. It’s the kind of perfectly put together aesthetic that would normally make us roll our eyes and mutter cynically about all kinds of ‘style over substance’ clichés, but with these four it quickly becomes clear that they genuinely eat, sleep and breathe everything they do with total and utter belief.
“I think every element of the band from our music, to our artwork, to our image, to the live show is completely intertwined somehow. It all informs the other thing. I’ve always been the type of guy who walks into a record store and, just based on the artwork, I’ll know I’m probably gonna like the music,” explains Jacob, the most softly spoken of the four, prone to long bouts of silence punctuated with eloquent, perfectly phrased nuggets of wisdom. “It gives the band substance. These throwaway bands – who the fuck cares about all the lyrics? They think it makes them a legitimate or credible band or something but all of that’s really see through; I think what gives a band substance is a love of consistency that shows there’s thought that’s gone into it, ‘cos otherwise it’s just haphazardly doing things that don’t go.”
Despite their slightly unlikely beginnings, The Drums are most certainly a band that are all about consistency; one that knows precisely their intention and what they stand for. Their self-titled, debut full-length offering is a masterclass in simple, understated, pop purity – the likes of ‘Best Friend’ a perfect, jangling, summer gem underscored with wryly dark lyricisms (as far as album openings go, “You were my best friend/ but then you died” is a pretty punchy first statement) and Pierce’s coy croon, whilst ‘Forever And Ever Amen’’s Cure-recalling riffs and soaring chorus make for a stunning mid-album highlight. Pop, it seems, is a subject that is nestled close to the band’s denim-clad hearts.
“We wanted The Drums to be a band that strived to put out perfect songs. Whether we’ve done that or ever will, that’s our goal – to make perfect pop. We love the idea of America in the 1950′s where you go out the door, open your car, turn on the radio and there’s no chance of hearing a bad song – it’s always wonderful and beautiful,” says Jonathan.
“I don’t think we’re trying to be retro, it’s just in modern day music no-one is writing good pop songs. What’s considered a good pop song these days is really embarrassing. It should be embarrassing for people. It’s just awful,” adds Jacob, clearly genuinely bothered by the subject. “The word pop has gone through some severe abuse I think. Since its conception it’s turned into such a big and fascinating thing – most people when they hear the word think of big labels and big money, polish, whereas to us Orange Juice write the perfect pop song. Pop, or what we think of as pop, what we like about it is that it has nothing to do with time, it transcends time. Songs from the 50s, 60s, 80s, now… it doesn’t really have anything to do with whether it’s retro or whether it’s new. If our music is somewhat rooted in 50s/60s America that was just where we landed, it wasn’t what we went for. Pop to us is about melody and subject matter and things being perfect but simple.”
Perfect but simple seems to act as a neat summary for the ethos of the album as a whole. Half written in Florida at the same time as their ‘Summertime’ EP, and completed in New York after a tour break that saw the band regularly playing at least four shows a week –“anywhere anyone would let us play” – the album certainly tips a hat to the nostalgic figures of pop music past but absorbs it’s influences rather than drowns in them. It is clearly much, much more than the sum of its parts.
Also notable, and another facet of their strive for simplistic purity, is that – despite numerous offers from a host of industry bigwigs – the band recorded and produced the album themselves, releasing it on Moshi Moshi, the UK indie label that put out their first single. Jonathan is typically romantic on the band’s decision.
“We kind of feel like we have this gang mentality, it feels really good so the last thing we should ever do is change what we’re doing. It’s so sad, you see it all the time, there are so many bands who have something so pure and beautiful and then their eyes get big when the label offers them someone impressive. You have this person mix it and this person master it and by the end the finished product has lost all of its purity and anything that’s special about it. You’ve got to hold onto your guns.”
The only time this talk of steely determination and self belief seems to falter slightly is with regards to the last minute inclusion of two tracks from their previous release – most notably, breakthrough smash, ‘Let’s Go Surfing’. For a band existing in their own self-sufficient bubble, is it an attempt to pander to the record-buying public or a straightahead choice to include what is one of their hallmark songs? When questioned, the four-piece’s motives shed a far more palatable light on the matter.
“It feels like as a listener or a fan or whatever, the sound that the full-length introduces with ‘Down By The Water’ or whatever is a really strong representation of who we are. It’s the same with ‘Surfing’. The song is really such a big part of what we’ve done, and when it’s taken outside of the EP it holds up better. The rest of the songs were a little more light-hearted or something but when you take it out of context it’s, again, a strong representation of what we’re doing or whatever,” Jonathan explains.
Adam, the driest wit of the group with the look of a man on a permanent acid trip, is characteristically straight-talking.
“Some people will associate us with that song – it was the first one we released, it did OK, we had a video for it. A certain kind of fan will just associate us with that one song,” he explains, “but then a certain kind of fan – the kind that will really care about what we’re doing and not just what we’re releasing as a single – for them it doesn’t matter. There’s something for everyone when you put a song like that on the album.”
You get the feeling that, ‘Let’s Go Surfing’ or nay, ‘The Drums’ is an album that’ll have something for everyone on it regardless. One of the most distinctive sounding and visually arresting bands to emerge this side of The Strokes hiatus, the four-piece are slowly setting the world straight – if ever there’s a case of not judging a book then The Drums are surely top class contenders.
Nestled in a blissful pop limbo between genre and time, The Drums are resolutely doing it their own way.
“We left New York to get away from any influence or scene and went to Florida to write a bunch of these songs and develop our sound so, y’know, we don’t really take cues from any modern acts that are going on right now. Our entire strategy… I guess strategy’s the wrong word, its actually kind of the opposite – I mean, we just do what we do. What makes up The Drums is this idea of ignoring what other people are doing.”
If stubbornness sounds this good, well, who are we to argue?

‘The Drums’ is released on Moshi Moshi on June 7th.