Beat Surrender

It’s 3pm here in blighty and 10am in New York, but still several hours too early for Connor, the baby faced drummer of The Drums as we’re greeted with a super husky and dazed, “hello?”, for our transatlantic call. Unless you’ve been passed out underneath your sofa since NYE you can’t have failed to notice these four chiselled NYC hipsters who’ve got the music industry moistening its pants and reaching for their cheque books. Since the release of their Summertime EP at the end of last year, Conor along with Jonathan (Pierce, vocals), Jacob (Graham, guitar) and Adam(Kessler, guitar) have rocketed to the top of the BBC Sound of 2010 list alongside Ellie Goulding and landed the cover of the NME – all within less than 18 months of being together.

So what’s got everyone dancing to The Drums’ beat? “I think the difference between us and other bands is like, we care about how the band comes across on all levels: musically and aesthetically” Conor explains. And, he’s right. Looking like James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause and having songs that Phil Spector would break jail for; The Drums make you want to be either in their gang or make out with them. Describing the perfect pop song as, “probably somewhere between ‘Pale Spectre’ by The Wake and ‘Leader Of The Pack’ by the Shangri-Las”, their Summertime EP took the 50’s three minute pop formula and married it to the desolate cool of the Factory Records era. “The band kinda started on those core pop values from the fifties and sixties” Conor tells us dragging out each vowel, “we kinda naturally, like, the four of us, were only around us four and nobody else and we were just working on what we wanted our songs to sound like”.

The band’s debut album due out this spring looks set to continue where the love affair started with Summertime, but maybe with a few heartaches on the way: “The songs still sound like Drums’ songs” Conor reassures us, “but, maybe they’re a little less jumpy or uppity…-people have described the Summertime EP as happy or fun whereas the full length record has songs that are upbeat and songs that are also a little more brooding and stoic”. The song writing on the album has followed a similar pattern to the debut EP with the band’s original pioneers Jonathan and Jacob writing the songs with occasional input from Conor and Adam. Conor revealed: “the actual song writing is still in the way that the Summertime EP went where Jacob and Jonathan write the songs and try and find collaboration with whatever band member if there’s reason for it, or if there’s an idea that somebody has…it’s sort of like constantly the four of us bouncing ideas off each other for everything that the band does”.

This month The Drums head out on the NME Shockwaves Awards tour along with Bombay Bicycle Club, The Big Pink, and The Maccabees. The band’s dedication to the values of pop’s golden era, when The Supremes’ perfectly teased bouffants were more important than who was playing the songs, has seen them use a backing track when they play live. “You showcase yourselves when you play and in the process we want it to look a certain way, we want it to feel a certain way and come across a certain way”, Conor says slightly defensively like tired leader explaining his party’s manifesto, “we use backing tracks because there’s things and aspects of our songs that we want to portray live without having to compromise the visual of our show”. Although, somewhat controversial “the visual” is attention grabbing enough with Jonathan flailing his arms like Morrissey and David Bryne in a dance off as matching backing singers shoop in time. It’s something that UK audiences are already lapping up, as their a few sold-out dates last year showed. Conor tells us: “We came out there last year…we played to like 30 people in an attic in Cardiff and then came to London to huge crowds in Koko in Camden – I loved that – I think that in a lot of ways the crowds in London were a lot more fun and accepting than the crowds we get a home sometimes”.

With their poster boy good looks, love of pop hooks, and east-side cool The Drums look set to be leaders of the pack.