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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Five years ago, the Cold War Kids exploded onto the indie-rock scene with their debut record Robbers Cowards. The album featured a rare emotional fragility and bluesy verve\u2014emplified by the haunting, infectious lead track, &amp;quot;We Used to Vacation&amp;quot;\u2014and it made the Long Beach, California band fast favorites of among a pair of audiences that rarely see eye to eye: hip audiophiles and rock radio stations. Their new album, Mine is Yours, drops on January 25th, and it shows off an even more polished sound. Frontman Nathan Willet spoke with GQ about the Cold War Kids&amp;#39; place in the scene, their ambitions as a band, and their possible participation in a certain upcoming music festival in the desert.\n\n You just got back from Australia. What was the response like down there? \n\n Australia has to be one of the craziest places. You forget how well you do\u2014it&amp;#39;s exaggerated how well we do in Australia\u2014and just how strange and cool that is. We never took for granted how weird it is that people know all our music. It&amp;#39;s strange when you haven&amp;#39;t been to place in so long and people know the words to a song and sing it louder than ever.\n\n The sound on Mine is Yours feels richer than your previous work. How did it come about?\n\n On the first two albums, we put this huge emphasis on recording live and valuing the spontaneous above all else. If notes were wrong or if I was singing off key but it felt right, we would kinda go with it. We treated the studio as taboo and felt that if we spent too much time in there, it would take some of the purity out of it. So we came into this one wanting to totally flip that. We spent a lot of time in the studio. We tried to write the songs in the same style but really nail the parts when we recorded them. Everything we recorded in the past was done in a couple of weeks, and we spent three months on this. And one of the things I wanted to do going in was have it be a much more personal album. Much more intimate. I&amp;#39;ve always veered away from anything autobiographical, and this was a lot different. On the second record, I felt like there were a lot of failures on my part in terms of actual songwriting. It was less cohesive. There was a lot of ambiguity, and a poetic side that I just didn&amp;#39;t feel connected to. And so I had this epiphany: I wanted to do something personal that risked more.\n\n This new record does have a kind of maturity about it. And speaking of maturity, it seems like now you guys are kind of the grown-ups on tour. You guys enforcing curfew out there?\n\n I think we felt young to the bands that took us on tour really early\u2014they were bands that we really looked up to. But a lot of those bands, like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, they really aren&amp;#39;t doing\u2026 [Ed. note: Willet didn&amp;#39;t finish his thought, but he seemed to be pointing out that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have gone essentially radio silent since their breakout 2007 record Some Loud Thunder.] In this last year, I realized how totally beating-the-odds it is to be relevant five years or three albums into being a band. Which is kinda sad, when bands don&amp;#39;t get to that third record. Because that&amp;#39;s when things really get interesting. I know we definitely needed the time to mature, so I feel super lucky to have been going this long. It takes a lot of\u2014I don&amp;#39;t know\u2014tenacity, desire. So, yeah, we have something that makes people probably look up to us. Which is interesting, because we&amp;#39;ve also toured with bands like Death Cab For Cutie, who are on a just whole other level. And we&amp;#39;re definitely not that.\n\n Then what are you?\n\n It will be interesting to see where this record goes. We were definitely more ambitious with it. I think we&amp;#39;re in this really unique space. We&amp;#39;re not an arena band. But we&amp;#39;ve also really secured a place for ourselves. People have stuck with us through the years. We obviously have something that&amp;#39;s special and it remains to be seen what this record will do for us.\n\n Where do you hope this record will take the band?\n\n I think you have to be careful how much expectation you bring into things. We&amp;#39;ve always had the advantage of being patient\u2014the kind of band that gets to make the albums we want and play it where it lays. But, yeah, we are a lot more ambitious this time around.\n\n Looking at your tour schedule, I notice that you don&amp;#39;t have any dates officially booked in April right around the time of Coachella.\n\n That is correct.\n\n Can we deduce anything from that gap?\n\n Definitely maybe.\n\n An almost-exclusive! Hopefully we&amp;#39;ll see you in the desert."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/cold-war-kids-mine-is-yours-christopher-wallace>