Humility, Comedy, Whiskey and Energy: The Return of Silversun Pickups

After a successful debut album and a few years on the road, the Silversun Pickups have gained a deeper confidence. Their muscular new record, Swoon, roars with the authority of a band that’s found both gravity and velocity. With string sections that wash over you before giving way to tight, grinding and endlessly distorted guitars, Swoon is a brave sonic attempt to recapture the mainstream’s fascination with its noisier edges. Brave, too, are the Pickups’ attitudes toward the inevitable comparisons. Nursing whiskeys beside a bubbling fountain at Edendale, an oasis on Los Angeles’ East Side, the band brings up the oft-referenced Smashing Pumpkins before I’m gauche enough to do so, matter-of-factly deflating the issue.

“If that’s what you need to understand it, then fine,” says guitarist/vocalist Brian Aubert. “There’s nothing we could do to change what happens when the four of us get together.” Still, Swoon’s cinematic breadth may revive early comparisons to My Bloody Valentine—as serendipity would have it, the band finished recording Swoon’s guitars the day MBV came to town. “It really schooled me so hard,” Aubert says. “It was so humbling and truly astonishing to see this because all the mythos that is talked about with them was true. People’s clothes were rippling, a light fixture fell off the ceiling and hit this guy in the head. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

Swoon initially seemed too epic, even to the band. The Pickups laugh about the evening they went home after listening to the album’s original 12-song sequence. “I went home right after that meeting and listened to every record and looked at the times,” Aubert says.

“Oh my God,” adds drummer Christopher Guanlao, as keyboardist Joe Lester grins and bassist Nikki Monninger completes their sentence, “I did that too!” All talking at once, they reel off a list of records that sound like they should be longer than an hour but actually aren’t. It’s an endearing flash of vulnerability for a band with such strong commercial prospects and a new album that sounds so huge.

“A lot of bands can be very precious,” Aubert says, “so we’re very loose about things and that makes it easier. Because we do think our music is precious, and we work hard and it’s one of the most precious things in our world. But because it’s so precious we don’t have to be.”