Yeah, yeah, we’re all sick of this narrative: beloved indie band burns itself out on the precipice of mainstream success, withdraws into the pop-music ether for an extended period of soul searching and finally resurfaces after throwing out the rule book and allowing itself the luxuries of a plush studio recording with its Best Album Yet.
Sometimes the story’s not just a story, though. Sometimes it’s fact. And so the story goes with Vancouver duo Japandroids and its highly accomplished third LP, Near to the Wild Heart of Life.
Vocalist/guitarist Brian King and drummer David Prowse had logged more than 200 shows in support of 2012’s celebrated Celebration Rock — “I lost count,” admits King — by the time they finally staggered off the road in late 2013 and took a much-needed break from the band for pretty much the first time in its seven-year existence.
The six-month pause was necessary to recharge Japandroids’ thoroughly depleted batteries, but also to renew King’s and Prowse’s shared creative spirit. They had, they agreed, taken the whole jubilant, maxi-minimalist, fist-pumping Japandroids thing “as far as we thought we could take it” on Celebration Rock and subsequently burned themselves out on it a little bit.
For a band so synonymous with “the feels,” it would have been dishonest for Japandroids to carry on down the same old path if they weren’t really feeling it. So, yes, after that extended period of soul searching, they threw out the rule book and allowed themselves the luxuries of a plush studio recording — including a titanic mixdown from frequent National collaborator Peter Katis — while making Near to the Wild Heart of Life.
“There was definitely pressure on us to follow up with Celebration Rock, Part 2 — you know, now that we’d kinda nailed the formula, just keep repeating it indefinitely,” said King from the Japandroids 2017 tour opener in Madison, Wis., this past Monday. “That didn’t particularly interest Dave or I.
“The thing that really kind of got us excited and inspired to start writing again together and to make this record was the idea of just kind of breaking away from that minimalism, breaking away from the rules that we’d placed on ourselves, just kind of doing whatever we felt like doing. . . . So this record is very much an attempt — our first attempt, I guess — to stray outside the boundaries that we’d previously placed on ourselves.
“It never occurred to us before this record that we could make a record with higher production values or other instrumentation, or where not all the songs are raging fast or things like that. So it was really kind of the first step into a sort of new world, in a way.”
Fret not, the new album still has the anthemic, life-affirming thrust and spine-tingling punk-rock noise of “classic” Japandroids. But, as it turns out, messing around with newfangled ideas like tempo changes and keyboards and lovingly layered production has actually made Japandroids an even better band.
Previously, if there was a criticism to be levelled at the pair, it was that they basically had one thing that they did really, really well. After thrilling to the breathless 36-minute mini-odyssey that is Near to the Wild Heart of Life, it’s impossible to make that criticism any longer.
“We definitely were aiming to make something more like a complete album,” says King. “A lot of our favourite rock ’n’ roll records of all time, they just feel like complete albums: they take you on a journey from start to finish, there’s all kinds of different songs; there’s different moods; there’s different tempos and a lot of ups and downs. And that’s just not something we were able to do on our first two records.
“It was a lot of the same kind of intensity and feeling, and we purposefully wanted to branch out and try to have some of that musical ebb and flow that our favourite records have. And it was those songs that were the most exciting for us, that we were really excited to work on.”
There was some worry on King’s and Prowse’s parts that disappearing from view for a couple of years right after they’d achieved their greatest success to date — Celebration Rock was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize and muscled its way up to No. 37 on the Billboard Hot 200 — and making an ambitious new record essentially in secret might completely derail the momentum they’d built up.
They were, thus, delighted to watch all the small-venue warm-up dates they’d booked last fall, including a thoroughly mobbed gig at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern in October, sell out instantly. And now, as Japandroids commence their first proper tour in three years, they’re looking at another run of sold-out dates on both sides of the border, including a two-night stand at the 1,400-capacity Danforth Music Hall on Friday and Saturday nights.
“It’s really exciting,” concedes King. “We decided when we were gonna make this record that we were gonna do it on our own time and we weren’t gonna tell people about it, and we were just gonna try to shut everybody out of the process and just do our thing, and there was definitely some feeling like that might cost us. People might forget about us.
“And we just feel really, really fortunate that people just kept listening to the music and kept the band alive, and really seem more excited now than ever to have us come to their towns and play. It’s just a really great feeling.
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