Liars talk new album, covering The Doors

You’d be forgiven if you assumed Liars were pretentious snobs. Since releasing their pioneering dance-punk debut They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top in 2001, these rockers have done pretty much everything to fit the pretentious rocker modus operandi. They've play art rock. They've record “tribal-influenced” albums. Their lead singer has lived in Berlin. They were part of the New York dance-punk “movement” in 2002.

But chatting up lead singer Angus Andrew, it’s striking how far-off this impression is from the truth. It’s turns out that Andrew is actually a pretty down-to-earth guy, who — like most other artists — gets stressed about releasing a new album. Earlier this month, we talked to Andrew about Liars’ new self-titled album (out August 28 on Mute), mentoring younger musicians, and why Slovenians are all about Liars.

Paste: First off, I just want to say that your new record is incredible.

Angus Andrew: Oh, thanks. It's really scary putting out a record. You never know what people are going to say. I appreciate it.

Did you record this in Berlin?

We did do the primary recording session in Berlin in the same place that we recorded Drum's Not Dead. But the fact is that at the time Aaron (Hemphill) was living in Los Angeles and I was living in Berlin. And we do a lot of home recording ourselves. Sometimes it works its way into the actual final, so it's a process that involves us working a lot at home in our separate cities and then meeting somewhere, and in this case it was Berlin to do the final recording.

A lot of songs you record sound like rock songs — "Plaster Casts of Everything" and "Cycle Time" specifically. Why the change? Was this a deliberate choice?

I'd say that it's more that it just happened. I think there's a point in songwriting after Drum's Not Dead that I think I realized that maybe I had learned some stuff about making music and that I actually could go and play a blues riff that might be in "Cycle Time," but it sounds very familiar to me. So the things that I had steered clear of, maybe the more conventional things I steered clear of because maybe I thought that I couldn't actually play that stuff. Maybe my previous songwriting was about experimenting with the guitar or the bass pretty much because I didn't know the notes. I think I'm starting to learn a bit more.

Liars is your first record without specific focus or theme. How do you think fans are going to react to this change?

I don't know. I've gone through several freakouts in the process of making this thing. Just sitting there listening to a rock song that we've made and you're just like, "Oh my God are we really going to put this out?" But at the same time it's really liberating and I just hope people get a bit of that sense of liberation. We deal with this a lot I suppose. The idea of developing an identity that people relate to and then smashing that identity with the next record.

Well yeah, especially considering the change between Trench and They Were Wrong, So WeDrowned. A lot people reacted—

They freaked out, yeah. [Laughs] In a way that's a shame but in a way that's something that's bothersome. And that's really what we're all about — keeping it fluid and movement rather than being a stagnant.

Why the quick turn around with this record?

In a lot of ways, for us, it's how we keep on moving on. If we didn't do a quick turnaround here, we'd be sort of lingering in the Drum's Not Dead era. And that can be a bit of a ball and chain, so to speak.

I know you've said that you start working on the next record almost immediately after you finish recording another. How much of this was in some kind of nascent stages when Drum got put out.

Not really in the written stages but in the idea. I think what happens is as soon as we finish our sense of working on a record, which apart from the couple weeks where you're in the studio, it's quite of lot of post-production and mixing and mastering and all that. Once you've gotten through all that you feel already that you need to react against that. I think by the time we've finished completely making Drum's Not Dead and it was obviously a lot of drums, automatically I think I went home and picked up a guitar and wanted to play a guitar solo. You just want to go for the thing that you've been missing, maybe. And that's most immediate.

I've talked to some musicians that have had a year between when they finished the record and it was put out—

Yeah, that's what happened with us and Drowned. And really it did take a long time with Drum's Not Dead as well. You might have read that we made a record and then reworked it, remade it. So those projects are really long. I think for a lot of dudes or chicks — whatever you say — like us in music, things are much more immediate than the record companies can deal with. And so they may not want us to go and make another song, but by God do we want to. And that's why by the time we get on tour we're already playing new songs. Songs off the next record.

Are there any plans for a tour yet?

Yeah we'll be doing a US tour in September. We're beginning at the end of this month in Europe and then we'll be going on from there.

Have you noticed a difference between touring in Europe and the U.S.?

It's a big difference. It's one of the reasons I've been living in Europe for so long. The way they consume music is quite different. These sort of festivals and large events where people pay Liars to play a big show in Slovenia, and that's great. Much more in terms of making a living, we can do it there in Europe, whereas in the States it's really difficult to just tour.

Why do you think it's so easy to make a living off music over there?

I don't know. Obviously, there's a lot more countries in Europe and there's that, but overall, it's a weird thing that everyone we talk to is trying to figure that out. It's such a completely different market, America. With all the different sorts of commercial music that's here it's really kind of baffling. At the same time the last tour we were on we played a big open-air festival in the middle of Paris that was free and the headliners were Liars and Wolf Eyes. You know, what's the deal with that? I remember being backstage with those guys and just going "Oh my God. Where would this happen?" It's incredible.

Do you know who's going to be behind the video for "Plaster Casts of Everything"?

Yeah, a good friend of ours Patrick Daughters, who's done quite a few videos recently. He did The Shins' video recently. He actually helped us do an old video. He's got some loopy ideas that he thinks that obviously when you work with a band like Liars you can sort of try anything. That sounds fun. I like when some director says he's going to pull out all his weird gags.

I know you've mentioned that you've got a lot of extra tracks laying around. You apparently recorded another version of Drum's Not Dead. Do you have any plans to release some of those unreleased tracks any time soon?

I don't think anytime soon. I think eventually that'd be interesting. I don't know what's interesting for people and what's interesting for us. But I think even the alternate mixes of this last album worked really good. I know that sounds stupid but at least putting them on the MySpace or something. I like people to hear how the songs progressed from demo versions to what they are now. I think we're open to that idea of releasing these things that are sort of in the vault right now. But obviously, it's always important for the right time and the right sort of setting. And there have been a few things that have come out, like we put out that "Sunset Rodeo" song.

That was the one for the Adult Swim show, right?

Yeah. So that's something fun for us because that was a song we had made in the same period — maybe it was going to be a b-side — we thought we'd put it out there. So I like when those sort of things come out.

Any other plans for any other projects like that?

We got a split with the Blood Brothers.

Oh really?

Yeah, that's coming out on Handheld Heart, that's a small label out of L.A.. And that's the Blood Brothers and the Liars doing Doors covers.

You've worked with them before. Your drummer Julian Gross did some art for them a while back.

Yeah and we've done a lot of touring with them. They're just good buddies of ours. That's another band almost like Deerhunter where you get guys who are all good musicians and when we go on tour with them and you see them all play together you're really just like "wow." As well as the fact that they're young and they've got their shit together. One of them is doing band booking, one of them is doing management, you know what I mean? It's inspiring to come across young guys like that who've really got their shit together.

So do you get to any mentoring type stuff? Because I know that Bradford Cox of Deerhunter said in an interview that you guys basically helped those guys stay together. Does that happen often?

I think whenever we come across a band and they're people that we can talk to and connect with and then it becomes something that we're worth investing that advice in. I think Aaron took home the first copy of the Deerhunter record and gave a good listen. I think you've got to have a certain amount of personal investment in the people to want to go that far. Once we meet people like that, like Deerhunter or Blood Brothers, of course we're willing to talk our ear off about what we think about they're doing and stuff. That's great.