Three years ago, after the rapture ofCelebration Rock’s intensive touring came to a close, Japandroids disappeared from our lives.

Their website went dark and the boys passed their long nights of wine and roses unseen and unheard.

Now, as the sun rises over a new day – and scores of music fans lick their wounds from the year that was – Japandroids are back in town, bringing with them Near To The Wild Heart Of Life and all the fervour we’ve been missing.

Kicking off 2017 with a new Japandroids record seems like the perfect tonic for the times, but it wasn’t concocted with that intention. For Vancouver rockers Brian King and David Prowse,positivity was par for the course; a natural ingredient to their brand of garage rock rather than a response to a moment in history.

“For people in the US, it’s like a comment about how, ‘You announced your record around the time that Trump won the election, so did you plan to fight this evil with something positive?’” says King. “And I’m like, ‘Man, when we were recording this record, it wasn’t even announced that he was running for President!’ It’s like, ‘Do you really think this is part of our game plan? We’re not even American!’”

(Just days after our interview, during a performance of ‘Continuous Thunder’ at Sydney’s Red Rattler, the audience converged in a venue-wide, spontaneous group hug – which might explain the depth of feeling people have for this band, and why the new album’s timing would seem fortuitous.)

“2016 was a shit year for a lot of reasons, and I think people are kinda desperately looking for some way to put it behind them, and positive things to put in their minds instead of all the negative,” King says. “And Japandroids make very positive, life-affirming rock music, I like to think. I can see why people wanna think of it in terms like counter-balancing the evils of the world, but I don’t think our music is designed to affect policy. It’s designed to affect values. It’s more about the individual and less about the [political]. Save that for Prophets Of Rage.”

It may not be openly political, then, but Near To The Wild Heart Of Life is still just as restless as the times. “The future’s under fire / The past is gaining ground,” cries King in the opener, evoking the tightrope space in which the new record was crafted. There was never any debate over the opening track, but having its name spread to the front cover, and thus define the whole record, was not so obvious. Prowse calls it an “old-school thing to do”.

“Honestly, we did that a bit reluctantly,” says King. “There was definitely a time in music history where [there were] shitty records with one good song, that song is number one and that’s what the record’s called, and then the rest of the record sucks.”

“We’re bringing back that trend!” laughs Prowse.

Across eight tracks, the ’Droids serenade the boards they’ve tread on their global tours; the long roads that separate their homes in Mexico City, Toronto, Vancouver; and the romantic partners left behind as they chase their dreams.

“Song one is about the moment you decide to go away, song two [‘North East South West’] is about being gone, and the middle of the record is [about] balancing being away, finding your sense of place, finding your sense of home,” says Prowse. “A lot of that is finding a person who makes you feel that way.”

He’s talking about his girlfriend, but the comfort between Prowse and King shows they’ve found home equally in each other’s company. The bond they share goes a long way to explaining how they’ve maintained their sanity working so intensively with each other, especially given the pressure of producing a new record after two consecutive critical hits.

“Whenever you’re trying to make ‘art’, quote unquote, you’re always trying to push yourself to make something that is the best that you could ever have done,” says Prowse. “And so I think inevitably there’s always a lot of internal pressure that we put on ourselves, which always makes it a very intense process.”

Celebration Rock wasn’t done until we felt like we’d made something better than Post-Nothing, and this one wasn’t done until we felt like we had created something that we thought was better than the first two,” says King. “There’s definitely a motivating factor of trying to outdo yourself, but I’m not sure there’s an example of a band or an artist who continue to outdo themselves right until the end, you know?

“Maybe Metallica really thought St. Anger was their best album, I dunno!” he laughs. “I think we’ll continue operating under that until, I suppose, we become really rich and just implode. Or just a ‘so drunk with power and surrounded by yes-men that we have no idea that we’re making a piece of shit’ type deal.”

They’re unwilling to stagnate, unwilling to sit still, and despite every critic’s statement of Japandroids’ newfound ‘maturity’, still bursting with the same youthful fire. It helps that they share a singular vision for their music, welcome new perspectives in production, and stay true to the way they’ve always played: “back to basics, drums and guitar”, as a duo.

“We connected, playing as the two of us, and never found someone that we connected with in that same way,” says King. “Then we kind of eventually just stopped looking. I really don’t think bass players are getting the shit end of the stick; they can be in a two-man band, too.”

“Some of our best friends are bassists,” says Prowse. “We don’t hate them, we don’t have anything against them. It’s just not for us.”

What may surprise the fans is the embracing of new textures among the stripped-back, straight-up rock of Post-Nothing. Japandroids’ transformation peaks in the eight-minute ‘Arc Of Bar’, something of a prog rock anthem that’s been sparking rockist ire for its use of ‘synths’. Fear not, guitar heroes, as King is quick to reassure us that it’s not really synths, just “a guitar that sounds very synthy”.

“Certainly it’s a very foreign sound for a Japandroids record, very foreign,” says Prowse, recalling a moment with a fan in Vancouver who had followed the boys across Canada as they toured the new material.

“Because I’m triggering ‘Arc Of Bar’ with a sampler live, he was like, ‘When I first saw a sampler onstage at a Japandroids show, I was scared, I was very scared,’” laughs Prowse. “And then he came around.”

“We’ve been pretty dogmatic about the sonics of our band, so a lot of people, as soon as they think of our band, they think of a very specific kind of sound. So on some level, I think we can’t control how people respond to that kind of stuff. We just had to do what we wanted to do, y’know?

“I think the most important thing we can do is just stay true to ourselves and follow our muse and go where our inspiration takes us, because if we had just decided that people like this kind of album, let’s just make another one like this every three years until we die – ”

“We’d probably be a lot happier,” says King.

But Prowse hopes it would “piss more people off than if we just make records that are a little different”.

“Can you imagine if Radiohead just kept trying to write ‘Creep’ for the next 20 years?” says King. “We made the first two records that people loved just by following our instincts, and we just followed our instincts again. I mean, it’s worked twice before!”

And to those few still harking after the younger them, King says: “The kids will always have Celebration Rock.”

Near To The Wild Heart Of Life by Japandroids is out Friday January 27 through Pod/Inertia.

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