vallierojas: White Denim: Between indie rock and a hard place

They might be known for their uncompromising and frenetic live shows, but Texas garage punks White Denim are now under pressure to write pop songs

^'We've talked about starting another band and just writing really straightforward, boring pop songs," says White Denim bassist Steve Terebecki, sitting in a London bar. "We're on this label that really wants us to make hit singles, and I think it could be easy. We've even thought up a name for the new group: Crazy Sexy Rainbow." He laughs. "We'd just have to dumb down what we do a little."

Commercial success, the members of White Denim sense, is only a couple of compromises away, but that's never really been the group's aim. Their new album D is their first since signing with Downtown Records in the US; their previous albums were self-released. The new deal should mean better distribution and brighter prospects for them, but also involves compromises, not all of which sit easily with a group used to doing things their own way.

White Denim formed in Austin, Texas in 2006, after the members' previous group, Parque Torche, shed frontman Lucas Anderson. "Parque Torche was like a drinking game," grins singer and guitarist James Petralli. "We wanted to be the antithesis of what was going on in the Austin scene, which was twee pop. So we started this obnoxious comedy group, with the aim of being antagonistic onstage."

When Anderson moved to Russia, Petralli, Terebecki and Block elected to continue, under a new moniker, choosing, says Block, "the one we laughed at the hardest". When they weren't day-jobbing as wholesalers to department stores the trio rehearsed in Block's then-abode, The Trailer, a 27ft-long Spartan caravan owned by a local hippy, and located beside a creek 45 minutes outside Austin. While The Trailer lacked creature comforts, it was the perfect clubhouse for White Denim, who would spend the next four years writing and recording there.

The first song White Denim ever wrote at The Trailer was Let's Talk About It, an agreeable blast of garage post-punk that served as the lead track for their debut 7in EP, self-released in May 2007. Their sweaty, chaotic, energetic shows, meanwhile, made White Denim local favourites. "We were really going for it at the time, doing anything we could to make an impact," says Petralli. "It's all a blur."

The following March, they played Austin's annual music industry showcase South By Southwest. "We tried to stack the schedules," remembers Petralli. "We ended up playing 12 times over four days." These frenetic showcases won the group a deal with UK label Full Time Hobby, which repackaged the 7in and a subsequent nine-track tour EP as an album, Workout Holiday, released in June 2008.

With the brash riff to Let's Talk About It featuring on TV ads for Channel 4's Skins ? the best kind of heavy rotation 21st-century indie rockers can hope for ? the response White Denim enjoyed on their first UK tour provided all the affirmation they needed to continue following their instincts. "Discovering there was an audience for our music 3,000 miles away proved we didn't have to go about things in a traditional way," says Petralli.

White Denim remained leery about signing with a label in the US, however. "Record labels have to protect their investments, they want you to push the product, they want everything to fit marketing cycles," Block says. "But we have a goal for how we want this band to work. We want to spend as much time in the studio as on the road. And when we record a batch of songs, we want to be able to release them then, not have to stick to a schedule of only putting out one record a year. And that's not a business model, that's a creative model."

Having discovered toxic black mould in The Trailer, they relocated to a nearby Spartan Imperial Mansion ? 15ft longer than the Spartan caravan, with a cabin attached ? and began work on their second album, Fits. Workout Holiday had identified White Denim as unwilling to simply rewrite their hit over and over; Fits, meanwhile, ricocheted between psychedelic reveries, playful folk-funk and snarling punk rock set to restlesscarnival rhythms.

It was while touring on the back of Fits that the group were first approached by Downtown Records, which offered to give the album a much wider release in the US. In exchange, they remained on the road six months longer than they'd planned to promote the album's rerelease, playing the same set for a year, standing still longer than they'd ever planned to. "I thought that would suck, but I enjoyed it," admits Trebecki. "We were definitely ready to make the next album once we got off tour though."

Local producer Ryan Joseph had become a fan of the group, and offered them use of his 5th Street Studio, equipped with vintage analogue recording gear. Recruiting second guitarist Austin Perkins to the lineup, they decamped to 5th Street last spring, with a clutch of new songs informed by the fluid musical interplay they'd developed onstage and in The Trailer, and reflecting the records they'd been grooving to on the tour-bus ("Lots of southern rock, Little Feat and Steely Dan," remembers Petralli).

Six weeks after recording began, the album was complete. And then the problems began.

"D was completed last June," says Petralli, "but the label said: 'We need a single.' So we sent them 15 other tunes , and they chose one track, Drug, and made us work with a producer, and rewrite the song six or seven times ?" He wrinkles his nose. "It was really frustrating."

Meanwhile, the label handed the album to an outside mixer, who "quantised" some tracks, using computer trickery to clean up much of the looseness that is the band's charm. "We took those tracks back and remixed them," Block says, firmly. "We ditched the quantising."

Unused to such interference, and with no release date for D in sight, White Denim were at a low ebb. In response, they returned to The Trailer for one last batch of sessions; Block was vacating the Spartan and moving to Austin that autumn. A farewell to their past, Last Day of Summer gathered older songs and was offered as free MP3s via their website.

Was the label OK with it? "We didn't ask them," Petralli says, more bashful than bolshy. "We spoke to our lawyer first, because we definitely didn't want to get sued. But we had to do something. We all felt a year was way too long to not put some music out. The label was pretty upset about it. At the time, it was a little bit of an antagonistic move."

White Denim's act of brinkmanship ultimately didn't harm their relationship with the label; as Petralli says, "the album's coming out, so I can't complain". D, meanwhile, is a joyful, resolutely uncompromised tangle of songs that choogles like a post-punk Allman Brothers, that can thread proggy digressions and jazz-flute excursions into the melee without ever losing sight of the song.

They're reluctant to name any specific musical influences, partly not to slight any they don't name, and partly because, Block says: "We're not consciously referencing anything because it's 'cool' at the moment." White Denim don't care for definitions of cool, they're just unabashed and gleeful music nerds, the kind who wax rhapsodic for ages about Bubble Puppy, an obscure early Austin psych-rock group.

"They were badass, but they're, like, so unsung," Block says, admiringly. "Isn't that every band's fear, though? To be one of those bands that get slept on at the time, only rediscovered decades later?" As Block says this, you get a sense of the possible careers that await the group, should they make too many compromises, or not enough. They could end up like Bubble Puppy; worse, they could become Crazy Sexy Rainbow. Just be grateful, then, that they've gone to such lengths to remain White Denim.

D is released on V2 on 6 June

Stevie Chick

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds