In Trevino, Italy, Brooklyn three-piece We Are Scientists are a’hunting. But not for wild game or girls gone wild, but instead in this “small mediaeval town, with a pretty cool festival”, as frontman Keith Murray puts it, the band are looking for something entirely different. With time to kill, they’re sitting on a hill overlooking the town, thinking the obvious thing…is there anywhere to go and play video games?

“Every mediaeval town these days must have an arcade,” he opines.

“There’s a certain festivity that, obviously, comes by definition with a festival,” he says of their role for this day. “I think people are generally ready for a party at a festival, and I think there’s generally something more gratifying and something that puts you more at ease with playing your own show at a club, or a theatre. Festivals tend to make me a little more nervous – it makes me consider more the fact that I’m being forced to win people over that don’t necessarily know us.”

That’s not something the group have encountered a lot with their debut With Love & Squalor ensuring that they’ve had a rapid rise – they seem to have taken off around the world, with the band spending more time on the road than anywhere else over the last little while. “It’s done pretty well for us,” he confirms. “I definitely don’t feel like we ever encounter any real opposition – that’s just a sensation that we apply to ourselves, and if we come on stage and feel like people don’t know who we are then we want to make it worth their while to stand there and watch us, which I think is a good tact to take when you play for people. I always think it’s a better thing to make them feel like you owe them something rather than the other way around.”

They may hail from Brooklyn, but the sound of We Are Scientists is more in keeping with the UK scene of the likes of Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs, Maximo Park, and so on and so forth. In Brooklyn, they stand out as quite different to the likes of Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the deliriously good TV on the Radio. “Many New York bands enjoy greater success than they do in the American ‘heartland’. Likewise all those British bands that you named do extremely well in New York and less so in the Midwest. I think there is a certain kinship between the British and the New York music scene.”

He explains that there definitely is a very specific cultural chasm that exists in America, with the coasts definitely feeling more aligned with one another than the inside of the country, which is politically an entirely different animal. “The coastal cities are usually very liberal and the interior of the country tends to be more conservative, which may account for the coasts embracing the more artistic.”

When it came to record With Love & Squalor, We Are Scientists tested this very maxim, writing all the songs in New York, but recording them in Los Angeles. “We got a really cheap studio that we rented for 3 weeks in North Hollywood and recorded the album there really quickly, then sold it to Virgin Records.”

Yes, that’s right! We Are Scientists are a success story in that they’re a band who owns the copyright; they simply licensed it to the label. Financially that is all important – where most bands earn $1 per CD sold, We Are Scientists are comparatively far better off. The next trick for them is to ‘break through’ in America. “We definitely are at the point where touring wise we turn a profit in the States,” Keith extrapolates. “I don’t know if we have ‘broken’ the United States, and we’re definitely not on top 40 radio or anything, but as far as we’re concerned we do incredibly well there.”

These days, they can play a solo show to a 2500 capacity crowd in California, whereas a year ago Keith says they’d be lucky to drag 80 folks along. “It is incredibly nice that we can go on tour and make enough money for a while so that we can write our next record.”

The next record is the one for We Are Scientists. The trick is to get the timing right – Keith knows that it’s politics as much as anything else, with the record needing to come out at the right time and have the right sort of support behind it. “If you don’t become the band your label is going to decide that they’re going to push, because every label during each record cycle chooses one band that they’re going to push harder and then even they might not get much radio play, let alone radio play all over the United States, much less MTV play,” he claims. “We tend to not concern ourselves with the idea of it. At this point we feel like we’ve exposed ourselves artistically to a big group of people and now want to deliver an album that makes good on the promise of the first one.”

The writing process for the next record has begun, with two or three songs appearing regularly in the band’s current set, and five or six more currently being worked on by Keith in the confines of his solitude before he’ll present them to the band. “It’s hard when you’re on tour all the time as there’s never any privacy and there’s not that much time to sit around and work on parts,” Keith complains. “But we’ve got a good start, and we’ve got a week off before we come to Australia, and then after that we have 2 weeks and I think we’re going to spend as much time as possible in our practice space just hammering away at it.”

He says that there’s a distinct progression in the sound, following on from the same progression that he himself can hear on With Love & Squalor. “When I look at the first song that was written for our first album and when I look at the last song written for our album I can see the progression, and I think it continues that way. We’ve got more interested in trying to make the arrangements as complex as possible, while still using three instruments at the same time. Some of our earlier songs, such as “The Great Escape”, is largely chordal, whereas a lot of the later songs are more intricate, with a lot of bass work and more note-orientated guitar work. I think that’s still the direction we’re heading in.”

We Are Scientists are touring Australia now. Dates:
Monday 28th August - The Hi Fi Bar, Melbourne
Tuesday 29th August - The Gaelic Club, Sydney
Wednesday 30th August - The Zoo, Brisbane