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When your band's music is the sonic embodiment of a wild night spent burning the candle at both ends, longevity is mostly an afterthought. Prior to the release of Post-Nothing, Japandroids' 2009 debut full-length, the Canadian guitar-and-drums duo was resigned to releasing the record then burning out in a blaze of glory on the road. Ironically enough, the "go big then go home" approach to the record and tour was just what the band needed to keep its rock-'n'-roll dreams alive.
"For a long time, our vision for the future was a maximum of six months in advance," says drummer Dave Prowse. "We both wanted to keep making music, but at that point we didn't know if Japandroids was gonna be the one. But then we got that spark and would play to 60 people in Omaha and 300 in New York, and we thought, 'Holy shit, this has the potential to be a professional band that makes a living with music.'"
The spark Prowse refers to is the reaction he and guitarist-vocalist Brian King noticed after playing the debut album's two standouts, "Young Hearts Spark Fire" and "Wet Hair." Something about the tracks' amped-up alchemy of fuzzy open chords, rollicking percussion and highly shoutable choruses were revolutionary in their almost boneheaded simplicity.
And just like that, Japandroids were the heartland punk darlings of the blogosphere.
Hell-bent on maintaining momentum, Prowse and King went back into the studio armed with the confidence of professionals and a well-informed notion of what their audience wanted. The result was 2012's Celebration Rock, an eight-song album that buzzes top to bottom with earnest, fist-pumping anthems. It's the beer-soaked sound of two best friends "really rolling the dice on pushing [the band] as far as it could go," Prowse says. The gambit paid off handsomely for the duo. Celebration Rock landed in the top 10 of almost every major music blog in the U.S. and Canada, and the two-year tour that followed sold out nightly.
When King and Prowse finally took a breather in 2014, the two wondered whether capturing lightning in a bottle would put them up against a wall when it came time to do it all over again. It became clear that if their future as a band was at stake before Celebration Rock, now the question was their ability to avoid being typecast as a rowdy rock band that did only one thing well.
"Celebration Rock is very high-energy, and it's great to put on at a house party when you're six beers in and feeling amped up," Prowse says. "We liked that frenzy we got from our shows during that tour, but as time went on it felt like we became more interested in seeing if we could expand who we are as a band. There was a lot of discussion about how we could reflect a more complete picture of who we are and try to make a more complete-feeling record that has a great diversity of moves and takes you on a journey."
On this year's Near to the Wild Heart of Life, the effort to shove Japandroids fans out of their comfort zone is palpable. The record has its fair share of concessions to the diehards who still shout along to "The House That Heaven Built" in their cars, but it's hard to hear the strummed acoustic guitars of "North East South West" or the pulsing synth intro of "Arc of Bar"—a seven-minute travelogue about hustlers, whores and booze that functions as the album's centerpiece—and pretend it's just another day at the office for Japandroids. Any other band could slip those things into the mix without alarm, but the duo's stripped-down nature has given their music very little room to breathe.
"A big part of our identity is that it's just two of us and everything is live," Prowse says. "So it's natural for people to be surprised when they hear we didn't do that. But it was a very logical thing for us. We've been doing this thing for close to 10 years. How do we keep it interesting? If we stop having these restrictive rules about how we present ourselves and create music, it opens a lot of doors for different types of songs to be written, which is very inspiring and exciting to us."
Considering the expectations to follow up Celebration Rock with another banger, the reception for Near to the Wild Heart of Life has been a mixed bag. It would have been easy enough for Prowse and King to revisit familiar ground and hope for the best, but their decision to open up their sound to new possibilities was a wise one. Now that Prowse and King have finally quit their day jobs and accepted the responsibility of being full-time musicians, it's hard to blame them for setting their sights on something higher than being hopeless crowd-pleasers who don't know when to quit.
"For this record we had to take a risk," Prowse says. "Does everybody who loved Celebration Rock love this record? Probably not. But most importantly, we feel inspired by this record and that we opened a lot of doors for ourselves. After Celebration Rock, there was a feeling of, 'Where do we go from here? We do this one thing really well and people love it, but we can't keep making the same record.' For the next record, there's a million options."
SEE IT: Japandroids play Revolution Hall, 1300 SE Stark St., with Craig Finn & the Uptown Controllers, on Friday, March 17. 9 pm. Sold out. All ages.