If second albums are notoriously difficult to make, no one's bothered to tell The Thrills who are racing through theirs at the moment in LA.

"The songs sound so great," mainman Conor Deasy tells Billboard. "It's always hard to talk about something when it's not finished and you're in the middle of it. But we've been on the road for a year playing almost 130 shows, so I think there's a bit more of a live dynamic there. It's very much songwriting based though. Maybe it's a little bit more ambiguous and a little bit more raw, lyrically."

Scheduled for early 2005 release, tracks already in the can include 'The Irish Keep Gatecrashing', 'Smoke & Mirrors', 'Introducing The Fall Guy', 'Tell Me Something I Don't Know' and 'Follow My Rosebud'.

In the meantime, So Much For The City continues to do brisk business with American barcode sales of 68,000…and rising!