I think it's almost a unique control that artists can have now more than they ever did, I think if you don't be proactive about how you want your music to be visually represented, I think other people will do it for you - so how comfortable are you with people putting their own two cents on it?
I think something for us that we're always interested in is how people interpret the music or the band for themselves, and that sort of level of interactivity for us specifically is really awesome, but I can imagine for some bands the ability to make your sound and make your identity known could be challenging.
I've got pages and pages of snippets of stuff, and if Max [Hershenow] sends me a track to write to I'll go through all the stuff and the initial reaction of gut and how it makes me feel and I'll sort of go from there and start pulling my favourite pieces of my lyrics and that will be a very literal word collage and from there I'll sculpt it for and whatever reason the song sort of presents itself. It's a bizarre process.
I think there's just so much awesome music coming out of New Zealand, I've always loved The Naked And Famous, I absolutely love Ghost Wave... it just seems like there's a really cool scene happening out there, I'd love to go and spend some time there and see what other bands are popping up.
I love Tumblr, I love it, it's like collaging and collecting images, it's such a fun thing to do, it's something that's really therapeutic and I don't really know why.
Which even though we do have a very visual aesthetic and identity, we love it when people make their own videos to the music.
I think in this day and age it's very important.
It's funny, I write lyrics in a bizarre way - I'm always writing lyrics, mostly when we're traveling or walking around New York, that's when I'm writing most of the stuff.
'Fantasy' is one of the fewer tracks where it's more literal than most of our things, but at the same time it's totally open-ended. Clearly it's a song about things not really appearing as you want them to, or things either getting what you want and not being satisfied with it because it wasn't how you hoped it would be, or thinking you want something and not getting it and the realisation of that.
I think my favourite song on the album [Second Hand Rapture'] is 'Head Is Not My Home', I love the vocal melody and it's such a power hit of a track. Every time it pops on I like listening to it, I'm really drawn to it.
Growing up with Tumblr, I can imagine if I was fourteen now being in high school and being on Tumblr all the time in class - that must be such an annoying thing for teachers to have to deal with!
I can imagine for some bands the ability to make your sound and make your identity known could be challenging.
I think if you don't be proactive about how you want your music to be visually represented, I think other people will do it for you.
That's such a wonderful thing about the mixing process is when you write the demo or the track, [and] it sort of goes through a couple of different changes and you don't really know what tracks are going to end up working out.
"Pop" was a dirty word for a really long time and it feels like that's not the case anymore.
