WHITE DENIM PERFORMANCE

Re-energised by having their own studio, the band return with their strongest, most out-there LP in years TEREBECKI: Radio Milk studio is like an old shack on the east side of Austin. We got this old German Siemens console, James and I went up to Chicago and drove it back again. Yeah, it’s a bit different to the Dell laptop – a huge upgrade! PETRALLI: We had the same drummer on all of Performance [Conrad Choucroun], but we’d have different musicians in the fourth chair for almost every song. We made a performance-based record but with all the bells and whistles that we’re interested in. TEREBECKI: The title has a number of connotations, but there’s also a song called “Performance” on the record, and that song seemed like a good representation of the record. All our album titles over the years have had dual meanings, but most of the time it was referring to jeans – but this one finally steps outside of the adjectives describing jeans! PETRALLI: This is more of a band record than anything we’ve made before. We started every day with two parts, Steve or I would have a riff, and we’d spend a single day building up an arrangement. So the goal was to have a semi-finished instrumental composition by the end of the day. “Sky Beaming” is one of Steve’s – he had that entire form mapped out for us in demo form. He sent it to us and we just added out things to it. It’s a bizarre riff, it took me a while to get my fingers around that one, for sure. I still don’t really understand it. You know, the orientation of the mixing room is similar to the old caravan – a big, long shotgun house, it’s cool. It’s got a lot of soul.

Performance is out on August 24 on City Slang