Birth Control

"Ohhhhh, Perth,” Brian Aubert says with more than a little inflection, right at the start of our conversation. He throws in a mysterious chuckle. It's not the way that the vast majority of interviews begin, so the topic of just what Perth means to Silversun Pickups seems a good a place to start.

“Well, I don't know if you have stories, but we always do,” the frontman continues. “We always end our tours in Perth and people just go crazy. The last tour was with Birds Of Tokyo, and I don't know about them, but I know that our crew – I think one of our guys is still swimming in the ocean naked. I haven't seen him since, but I hope he's okay. When we go to Perth we're gonna go try and find him. The last time I saw him, he was on the floor of that tiki bar, what's it called?” Aubert sighs in agreement when Drum helpfully suggests the Hula Bula Bar, and the local delicacy of fishbowl-sized cocktails. “That's the one. Yeah, he had two in each arm. I just thought he was really thirsty.”

Aubert seems happy. Excited, as he must be, at the success of Silversun Pickups. It comes with that oft-mentioned double-edged sword; the fact that they've spent almost all of their time since the release of their third album, Neck Of The Woods, touring. “It was kind of weird,” Aubert contemplates. “I don't know when the album came out in Australia, but here it came out in the middle of May. Nikki [Monninger, bass] and I were flying around doing a lot of promo all over the country and Canada, and we were doing all these radio specials and one-offs, so a lot of stuff. We always find ourselves back at home for a couple of days, but it was really – to be honest, it was hard. It was a while since we were playing shows, and we remembered what they were like and it wasn't feeling like that for us yet. The time you've got is suddenly over, and then a week later it would start [again]. So for us it started about four or five weeks ago. We got on the bus and we were travelling around, and now we're all up and excited. It's all ready to go, but Nikki's having twins so she's tried to hold on as long as she could. When she found out we were going to Australia, she started to figure out ways to squeeze the kids in so they wouldn't come out," he laughs “But, yeah, she was definitely doing all these leg exercises.”

Monninger's pregnancy threw a spanner in the works for the tour (in a happy sense, mind you), forcing her to stay in their hometown of LA while the band went on ahead. So, with their appearances at the various Harvest Festivals looming, the band were forced to do something that they hadn't ever done in their ten-year history – find a replacement. “Our good friend, Sarah [Negahdari], who we've known for a long time, who is in a great band called Happy Hollows here in Los Angeles, put her hand up,” Aubert explains. “Nikki was working with her for three months, on and off, getting her geared up for this and now that she's been with us on tour, it's great, crazy. And again, she actually knows about the band in another way, she hears about what people might say about us and hears our music in a different context. And we don't know what it is, we don't know what people are thinking,” Aubert chuckles. “We're like, 'Why do people like us?' So having her in the band is a very refreshing experience.”