The Naked and Famous

Thu 11th Nov, 2010 in Features

New Zealand’s The Naked and Famous have had quite an amazing year with their quirky single Young Blood topping the charts earlier in the year, their new album Passive Me, Aggressive You debuting at #1 in NZ and getting added to the Big Day Out line-up for 2011.

But vocalist Alisa Xayalith says she really wasn’t expecting all this success. “Things have happened so much faster than we anticipated and it’s just been a crazy year. We always knew Young Blood- would be our first single but we never dreamed about the opportunities it has opened up for us”.

Having just completed a quick Australian tour the band is off to London and America, for their first overseas shows and laughing nervously Xayalith admits that she’s just trying not to think about it all, adding that “it’s pretty unreal that we get to travel and do what we love”.

When asked what bands they compare themselves with, Xayalith was unable to provide an answer, so instead named those who have inspired The Naked and Famous”So many bands have inspired us, there’s something to appreciate in every single genre” she says naming inspirations including Tool, Nine Inch Nails, TV on The Radio, Bjork and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

The Naked & Famous are starting to have a similar success story to that of the Temper Trap, and Xayalith even confirmed that the band is most likely going to be moving to the UK next year if things keep going the way they are going. “It’s kind of hard to take on the rest of the world when you’re living in New Zealand,” she chuckles.

Next year they are set to take on all six dates of the Big Day Out tour, having previously only played the New Zealand leg back in 2008. “I think next year when we play it will be the first time [in front of a festival crowd] with a five piece band and we will be feeling a little bit more prepared,” but she also says, “It’s hard not to be nervous, there’s so many amazing bands playing and we are going to be touring with them, doing all dates, it’s pretty unreal”. According to Xayalith, the band tries to make sure that the recordings of the songs translate in a live scene “so we try as hard as possible to make everything sound as close as possible to the recorded songs, but other than that I dunno you’ll have to come and find out”.

Xayalith is pretty keen to check out some of the acts playing while on tour too. She said she’s keen to see “Tool, LCD Soundsystem, Crystal Castles, MIA, Deftones and Angus & Julia Stone, but I think there are a lot of bands on the line-up that I am excited to see so hopefully I can catch all of them”. As for bands she’d love to tour with she “Nine Inch Nails was doing another tour, we’d love to tour with them [laughs], I dunno, it would be awesome to do a tour with LCD Soundsystem. We are playing a show with the Midnight Juggernauts in Los Angeles [in November] which we are really excited about. It would be cool to actually do a tour with Temper Trap, we tried to line up a show with them in LA because they will be here at the same time as us but they had already sussed out the support acts so we missed out. But yeah I think the Temper Trap would be a cool tour”’.

2011 will see the Naked and Famous focus on touring their debut album but Xayalith confirms that they started writing their second album, just a week after their first albums’ release in Australia. “That’s just the kind of band that we are, we never stop writing. No matter how much touring we do, we are so mobile and can write anywhere and we have the recording equipment to record demos here and there, so we’ve already started writing”. She says it took the band a total of about a year and a half to complete the first album though so they have no idea which direction the new album will take until much further down the track.