Ten years have come and gone since Cold War Kids first took to the stage in their homegrown Southern California scene. Time is typically unkind to indie rock bands. So how is that Cold War Kids are still here in 2014, selling out tours and releasing their fifth album in a decade amidst these 40 seasons of torrential fate winds, while so many of their peers have vanished?
“We worked really fucking hard, that’s the answer,” says Nathan Willett. “We worked really hard and we were successful, which is freakishly impossible, and we should embrace it. That’s our story.”
From his post at the front, Willett—along with the band’s bassist and visual director Matt Maust—has led Cold War Kids through the tricky 21st century rock and roll landscape, soaring over the peaks and facing the valleys head-on while carving out a place of the band’s own. Reaping sky-high praise from a mid-2000s blogosphere then growing wings as a live show juggernaut, they stand now with their fifth studio album Hold My Home as both a different animal and an unaltered beast all at once.
--------
Cold War Kids means International Blues. We began in August '04 with friends, jangly guitar, hand claps, and a Harmony amp in a storage room atop Mulberry Street restaurant in downtown Fullerton, CA. For the first practices, having instruments was secondary to stomping and chanting; Clanging on heat pipes, thumping on plywood walls. Hollering into tape recorders. Slipping and swaying into alleyways and juke joints of yesteryear. Tapping in to the American dustbowl and British maritime. On the restaurants roof the sound and feeling was cultivated and burned, built and hallowed out, painted and stripped to the primer.Almost three years have passed and we haven't let up since the starting gun fired. The album "Robbers & Cowards" was released in the US in October '06 on Downtown and the rest of the world in February '07 on V2. 'Why even have apartments?' We often ask ourselves as we have toured with the vim of a family reunion brawl across the US, UK, Europe, Australia and Japan.Cold War Kids strive to make honest songs about human experience in orchards and hotel rooms, laundromats and churches, sea ports and school halls. We love the songs of Dylan, Nina Simone, and the Velvet Underground and make our own, which we like to think, are pretty original.
Ten years have come and gone since Cold War Kids first took to the stage in their homegrown Southern California scene. Time is typically unkind to indie rock bands. So how is that Cold War Kids are still here in 2014, selling out tours and releasing their fifth album in a decade amidst these 40 seasons of torrential fate winds, while so many of their peers have vanished?
“We worked really fucking hard, that’s the answer,” says Nathan Willett. “We worked really hard and we were successful, which is freakishly impossible, and we should embrace it. That’s our story.”
From his post at the front, Willett—along with the band’s bassist and visual director Matt Maust—has led Cold War Kids through the tricky 21st century rock and roll landscape, soaring over the peaks and facing the valleys head-on while carving out a place of the band’s own. Reaping sky-high praise from a mid-2000s blogosphere then growing wings as a live show juggernaut, they stand now with their fifth studio album Hold My Home as both a different animal and an unaltered beast all at once.
--------
Cold War Kids means International Blues. We began in August '04 with friends, jangly guitar, hand claps, and a Harmony amp in a storage room atop Mulberry Street restaurant in downtown Fullerton, CA. For the first practices, having instruments was secondary to stomping and chanting; Clanging on heat pipes, thumping on plywood walls. Hollering into tape recorders. Slipping and swaying into alleyways and juke joints of yesteryear. Tapping in to the American dustbowl and British maritime. On the restaurants roof the sound and feeling was cultivated and burned, built and hallowed out, painted and stripped to the primer.Almost three years have passed and we haven't let up since the starting gun fired. The album "Robbers & Cowards" was released in the US in October '06 on Downtown and the rest of the world in February '07 on V2. 'Why even have apartments?' We often ask ourselves as we have toured with the vim of a family reunion brawl across the US, UK, Europe, Australia and Japan.Cold War Kids strive to make honest songs about human experience in orchards and hotel rooms, laundromats and churches, sea ports and school halls. We love the songs of Dylan, Nina Simone, and the Velvet Underground and make our own, which we like to think, are pretty original.
read more
show less