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AMSTERDAM – Brooklyn, New York is known for its experimental bands. The Drums, who debuted this month with an eponymous album, is certainly not one of them. “Our goal is to write really simple, stripped down pop songs”, singer Jonathan Pierce says.

The band was founded in 2008 in Florida. Pierce and guitarist Jacob Graham met years before at a christian summer camp. “Music dominated our lives”, Jonathan states. “It is pretty much all we cared about. The music that we liked was a little off centre from the music that the rest of the kids were listening to. Nirvana was all the rage, and we were listening to Kraftwerk.”

For a long time, Jonathan and Jacob played together as synth pop duo Goat Explosion. After that, they more or less lost contact. In 2008, Jonathan – who was living in New York, depressed – decided to go visit his old friend in Florida, where they wrote the material for both the Summertime! EP and the full-length debut album. The Drums “found themselves in Florida”. Jonathan: “For the first time we felt like: let's be serious about this. Let's actually write something that we want to write.” The motto was to “be selfish”, the goal to write “simple pop songs”.

Jonathan: “The fundamental elements of a pop song have never changed since their conception in the early 1950's. Those songs were immediate and stripped down, something seemed very vulnerable about them. We live in Brooklyn and we're surrounded by bands who put layer upon layer – everything is so dense and atmospheric. We just wanted to go the opposite direction, back to the classic idea of a band: four guys who write simple pop songs in a sort of rock 'n roll style. There's nothing experimental or hip about it.”

“So much of the popular music right now in Brooklyn is 'indescribable'”, Jacob adds. “To us that's boring. We want people to be able to describe what our band sounds like.” That their attitude is often regarded as being 'hip', he explains in a cryptic way: “If everyone is weird then no one is weird and the most boring person is the weird person.” Jonathan puts it even bolder. “We've made conscious efforts to be uninteresting”, he says.

Jonathan and Jacob emphasize how much they deserve their current success: in no time they have built up a loyal following in New York. “We begged everyone to let us play wherever we could, and we took every show that came our way,” Jacob says. “We created our own world in New York, kids started coming to every show.” Now The Drums have found the right sound, Jonathan doesn't see why they should leave New York on short notice. “I now feel like we could write a record in New York, because we found who The Drums are.”

The Drums was released on June 7th through Moshi Moshi.
The Drums live: http://thedrums.com/shows.html.

Interview: Bas Steeman
Text: Tom Springveld

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